


Till Things Are Brighter

by paperdream



Series: Author's Faves [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Canon typical body horror, F/F, F/M, Gen, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Alice "Daisy" Tonner Are Best Friends, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, projects my hyperempathy onto jon archivist and makes him infect daisy with it, statement fic in some chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:47:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 27,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26362147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperdream/pseuds/paperdream
Summary: She stood, offering him a hand up and going in for the kill. “You know I’m the best choice, Jon. You know I’ll keep all of them safe.”Time travel fic, but Daisy's the one who goes back
Relationships: Georgie Barker/Melanie King, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Naomi Herne/Evan Lukas
Series: Author's Faves [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2107956
Comments: 144
Kudos: 345





	1. Jon, ????

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is from "The Man In Black" by Johnny Cash. Current plan is to update on Tuesdays, with bonus updates when I have an unusual burst of inspiration (like today). Comments make that more likely <3 I know where the story goes in general strokes, and where it ends, and I'm really excited to share it!
> 
> If you want to come yell about TMA or ask how writing the next chapter's going, find me on tumblr @inklingofadream! I don't bite!

Jon’s hands clenched and flexed around the box. He didn’t want to release it, was afraid that after fighting to go where the Eye didn’t want him to find it, it would vanish if he lost track of it for a moment. He shouldn’t have been able to find it. Beholding should have burnt out the rebellious part of him that remained  _ Jon _ rather than  _ Archive _ , or set some other Power to stop him. Whenever his thoughts drifted to why he felt the Watcher’s gaze intensify, weighted with crawling adoration seeping from the point where Beholding bled into Filth, possessive and sick. No, he didn’t want to consider the idea that the Eye  _ liked him.  _

He focused as much of himself as he could gather on the assemblage before him: Martin, worry bleeding off him at the bloody tear stains still evident on Jon’s cheeks; Melanie, sharp and grating, entwined with the sensory blank of Georgie’s total lack of fear, the Admiral splayed across both their laps; Basira, stiff backed and serious; and Daisy, leaned against Basira’s knees and watching with a predator’s sharpness. The only people he had left at the end of the world. Friends, more or less.

“I’m sure you’re wondering why I called you here,” he started, but was almost immediately interrupted by Daisy’s snort at his overly-formal phrasing.

He glared at Daisy. “I found something.” He turned the box in his hands, unnecessarily drawing their attention to it; they’d all learned not to leave any unfamiliar element, however innocuous, unquestioned in the Fears’ world. He cleared his throat. He didn’t often speak, these days, except for Statements and whispered endearments whenever he and Martin found a bit of privacy. “Something that could… fix things, for lack of a better word.”

The focus on the box became almost tangible, even without any supernatural power behind it. It was an unassuming thing, splintery wood with faded bits of turquoise paint betraying the dark wood’s former color and a simple gold latch, its newness standing out against the worn lid it secured. 

“How.” Melanie’s grip on Georgie’s hand went white-knuckled, the word more a demand than a question. It shouldn’t be possible for her to fixate on it so utterly, without eyes. It sent a shiver up Jon’s spine, remembering when the same stubborn force had sunk a scalpel into his shoulder, echoed by the Eye’s uneasy jealousy, the Archive interacting with something that had Belonged to It and now Did Not.

“It should,” his voice cracked and faltered, like something was stopping up his throat. “It should be able to send someone back. To before the Change.” A headache was blooming behind his eyes.

“How?” Martin asked, resting a comforting hand on Jon’s shoulder, steadying him.

“I don’t know. Only one person, and they won’t be able to take anything tangible with them.”

“Like in a  _ Terminator _ naked time travel way or a bodysnatching our younger selves way?” Georgie dug her free hand into the Admiral’s fur, eliciting a purr of contentment.

“I don’t know.”

“Whose is it?” Basira asked, annoyance bleeding through. “If it works, it has to belong to one of  _ them _ , so which is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you  _ mean  _ you don’t know?” she snapped. “Isn’t that the whole  _ point  _ of you? To Know?”

“Basira.” Daisy’s voice was low, but still firm. Jon barely noticed.

“The Eye doesn’t want me to have it.” He needed to explain, couldn’t leave them wondering if it  _ didn’t _ work. “I have an idea what it does, but the fact that it doesn’t  _ want  _ me to is how I know it  _ will  _ work.” 

Basira hummed, unsatisfied. Martin leaned into Jon and gamely tried to pull the conversation forward. “So who do we send?”

Jon looked up at him and stuttered, “I- I thought I’d go. I caused the mess, I should-”

“ _ No _ .” Basira looked ready to pull the box from his hands. “We send someone we can trust not to turn into a monster, if we use it at all.”

Jon cringed into himself and nodded. “Al- alright, who would you suggest?”

“I will.” Martin offered.

Jon jumped in his seat. Half the appeal of the whole enterprise, the thing that’d pulled him through the Eye’s protestations, was the idea of being able to fix things so Martin never had to suffer as he had, never felt the need to submerge himself in the Lonely, the thought of giving back the stubborn, good-natured optimism of their first weeks in the Archives.

Before he could think of how to voice his own objections, Georgie was cutting in. “It doesn’t make sense for you to go, Jon, your boss kept too close an eye on you, he’d notice something was off. Same for Martin. It should be someone outside the Institute.”

That got to Melanie. “ _ You  _ can’t go! You were out of it,  _ we  _ were out of it, you can’t just go inviting the supernatural into your life, Georgie! If someone else goes and it works you could be  _ normal! _ ”

Georgie rounded on her girlfriend, face pinched in a way that meant she was probably about to tell her off for trying to make decisions for her when Georgie was an adult, thank you very much, and soon everyone was talking over one another, voices rising as they all shouted out considerations that made one of them a better or worse candidate than the others. Jon rubbed a thumb against the corner of the box, hesitant to speak up.

Finally, when Melanie and Martin were nearly at each other’s throats and Basira’s jaw was clenched so tight she seemed sure to crack a tooth, Daisy raised her voice above the fray in a low growl. “ _ Enough.” _

The word vibrated in Jon’s chest and for a moment Daisy’s teeth seemed to sharpen and gleam in the light and Jon’s heart jumped like a rabbit in the sights of a hawk. The others seemed to feel the same, and Georgie took the moment of fear as an opportunity to pull Melanie down into her lap, the Admiral long since retreated to his place at the mouth of her backpack.

“We won’t decide anything like this,” Daisy continued. “We should rest, let things cool down, think about it, and talk again in a couple hours.” Her tone did not leave room for argument. Slowly and grumblingly, the others spread out sleeping bags and curled up in their customary places for a few hours of uneasy quiet. 

Jon pushed Martin to lie down alone, too aching and nervous to join him. Martin fixed him with a gimlet stare. “You aren’t allowed to open that box without talking with me first,” he said, too low for the others to hear. “If you go it’s because it’s the best option, not on an impulse.” His mouth quirked in a gently grin, softening the words. Jon blushed and nodded, pressing a light kiss to that grin, then quietly made his way to the smaller second room that constituted both entryway and the only other room of their current shelter to remain intact.. Martin didn’t need to know that the thought  _ had  _ crossed his mind.

Jon took up his customary place there, and listened to the sounds of the other room soften to those of rest.

He didn’t startle, something nearly-like-but-not an hour later when Daisy crept into the entryway. He spent many “nights” there, keeping vigil while the others took comfort in miming sleep they no longer needed. It wasn’t unusual for Daisy to join him, the remnant of the predator Basira had chased through the ruined world urging her to movement.

This was different, though. Something new rested between them, made Melanie toss idly in the other room and Daisy meet his eyes with an intensity she hadn’t fixed on him since before the Unknowing. “I heard what Martin said to you,” she said, too quiet to disturb any of the others.

Jon stiffened. He’d forgotten that the Hunt had left her hearing sharper than it should have been, even returned to herself. “I wasn’t going to.”

“I know,” she reassured, sliding down the wall to sit beside him and knocking their shoulders together companionably. “But you could.”

It took him embarrassingly long to catch her meaning. “You want me to give it to you.”

She nodded. Daisy had always been blunt. “You don’t know how far back we’ll end up, right?”

“I know it’ll be far enough to stop the change!”

“But beyond that.” He shook his head. She nodded. “It could send you back to before you were the Archivist. Before you joined the Institute. The same is true for the others.”

“I… suppose.” His brows furrowed, trying to figure out what she was getting at. He wished it wasn’t so hard to  _ think _ , but the door in his mind to Beholding seemed to be rattling and banging on its hinges ever since he thought to go where it didn’t want him, trying to pull his attention to anything else.

“If you go, and you go back far enough, you could end up at a point before you got involved in any of this. Monsters and Doors and Statements.”

Jon nodded. “Potentially.”

Daisy’s expression firmed. “So I should go. I’ve been mixed up in it all since I was a kid. Then years as a cop. Any of the rest of you could ruin your own chance at having a normal life, but I can’t.”

Jon sputtered, “I mean- I mean if that’s how we’re counting I had my first encounter with the Fears when I was  _ eight _ , that makes me just as good a candidate as you!”

She turned her head, met his eyes. “But  _ he  _ kept his eyes on you the whole time you worked for the Institute. Didn’t pay me attention even when he had me hunting for him. Like Georgie said, he’d notice if you started acting strange, but not me.  _ And _ ,” she continued before he could raise a new counterpoint, “if I go then Martin can’t. I know you don’t want him to do it, for the same reason I don’t want it to be Basira. I’ll convince the others eventually, but I can  _ see  _ it fighting you, Jon. We need to act quickly.”

Jon’s mouth opened and shut, opened and shut, blush rising on his cheeks, the desire to contradict her clashing with embarrassment that she’d seen through his objections to Martin going so easily. She stood, offering him a hand up and going in for the kill. “You know I’m the best choice, Jon. You know I’ll keep all of them safe.”

He clenched his jaw and took the hand, box still gripped tight. “You’re sure?” He didn’t like the thought of Daisy, sent back to when she was fully in the Hunt’s claws with more reason than ever to listen to the blood in her ears.

“I’m sure. I’ll be fine, Jon. You don’t have to do everything. It’s okay to let us help.” she met his eyes steadily, no hint of a lie.

He huffed. “You sound like Martin.”

She let out an abrupt sound that might have been a laugh. “Just open it?”

He handed her the box, but put a hand over hers, keeping it from the latch, his mind racing. “I think… You can’t take anything tangible, but you could take information. Knowing. I could let you Know what I Know, about the Institute and the Statements and everything. If you wanted?”

She tilted her head, considering. “You think it’d help?” He nodded. “Lay it on me then.”

He held her elbows, as much to keep himself steady as anything else, and for the first time since he set out on forbidden paths immersed himself fully in the Eye. He didn’t want to hurt Daisy, did everything he could to make the information as unobtrusive and compact as he could, but once he started he couldn’t stop adding to it. They had no way of knowing when she’d end up, what she’d need, so he gave her everything he could: all the statements, everything about Jonah Magnus, Institute employees- and then he kept going, the Eye urging him on in a final effort to stop them.  _ See? _ it seemed to say  _ You could share everything, Know everything together with your Assistants _ , pressed a wild urge to smack to box out of her hands to shatter on the floor. He gave Daisy everything he knew about Jurgen Leitner and the Keays, every apartment any of them had lived in in the past decade, the Sports section of every paper published in the UK for the past half century, the answers to cold cases she never solved the first time, didn’t she deserve the chance at money and success and allies, doing this?

He felt Daisy tremble under his hands, and reluctantly pulled away. There was so much more she could Know, he could give her, what if…?

Daisy swayed on her feet and smiled at him. “Thanks,” she said shakily. She rested a hand on his shoulder and leaned in to kiss him gently on the forehead. “Goodbye, Jon.”

She opened the box.


	2. Daisy, ????-May 2011

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes here too because AO3 won't let you put notes on the first chapter until you have a second and I think they're important and I want folks who subscribed to see them.
> 
> Title is from "The Man In Black" by Johnny Cash. Current plan is to update on Tuesdays, with bonus updates when I have an unusual burst of inspiration (like today). Comments make that more likely <3 I know where the story goes in general strokes, and where it ends, and I'm really excited to share it!
> 
> If you want to come yell about TMA or ask how writing the next chapter's going, find me on tumblr @inklingofadream! I don't bite!

Everything was too much, too bright, too dark, too empty. She didn’t know where she was, but this was not a place, she was not a she. She’d had a name, hadn’t she? What was it? How did she get here? Why was there so  _ much _ ?

She saw everything and nothing, infinite sensations and absences pulling her attention in every direction. Sometimes she saw a scene, a glimpse into a life whose owner was real in a way she wasn’t (had never been?) and she tried to grasp them. A scene flashed past that seemed More than the others, something she could really grab and hold, but in her surprise it whizzed by and was gone before she could react.

She searched for another, tried to take them, but they seemed to become more and more infrequent. One rattled past that came with the feeling of pressure and  _ trapped let me out _ and for the first time in this not-place she felt afraid. She didn’t try to grab that one.

She didn’t know what was happening, but she knew she needed some of that Realness if she wanted to be Real herself, and she started to panic as the weightier scenes appeared less often. What would happen if they stopped altogether, if their less real counterparts, blurred-together mundanity, stopped as well?

Finally, she spotted one in the distant-here-nowhere in time to launch her not-being at it, held it tight to herself until they seemed to be one Thing, the feeling and thought of the scene embedded inside her. She felt victorious.

-

Daisy did not wake up, because she had not been unconscious. Her awareness was not, and then it was, standing over the body and half-dug grave of Calvin Benchley. Her head pounded, overflowing with information that hadn’t been there before. She finished digging the grave mechanically, choking down the fear that threatened to overwhelm her when she had to hop down into the hole. A half-present memory flashed before her eyes, a small, scarred man digging another grave not far from here, shovel fumbling in shaky hands. Her mind was too addled to make sense of it.

She finished burying Calvin, hid the freshly turned earth with underbrush, walked mechanically out of the forest. She knew where her car was, though she was not the same Daisy who had parked it there. She held the wheel in a white-knuckle grip, forcing herself to remain present, not to give in to the tidal wave of data that pounded in her skull. 

She’d only had the one safehouse, when she killed Calvin, hadn’t seen a great need for them until after she killed her first human. The mobile home was isolated and poorly equipped, but it was close. She stopped only once, urged by some practical instinct that seemed to speak from within her with a beloved voice to go into the first place still selling office supplies at one in the morning and buy a couple packs of pens and as many notebooks as she could carry. Hopefully the cashier wouldn’t feel the need to tell anyone about the woman buying enough notebooks to outfit an entire primary school class in the middle of the night. 

She knew she didn’t have to go into work- she’d taken a long weekend off in case Calvin was difficult. He wasn’t. A disappointing hunt. Too easy, but the extra time could only benefit her now, more time to put herself back together before she had to face anyone who knew her. She hauled her supplies into the little trailer and barely locked the door before she was at them, pouring everything banked in her head onto paper.

She barely noticed the world around her as she wrote and wrote and wrote, as fast as she could, all the information she could ever want spilling from her pen. The sun rose, and still she wrote, half-felt fears flashing before her eyes and the homey feeling of places she’d never visited. When she was spent at last she collapsed into bed, careless of the time or the notebooks strewn across the narrow floor.

-

It was evening when Daisy woke. She felt more herself, Jon’s last gift a greatly quieted corner of her mind instead of a throbbing totality. Where it had ebbed the Hunt had seeped back in. She didn’t belong to it as utterly as she had after the Change, or even as much as when she’d first met Jon, but it was there, and racing, bloody instinct waiting to be awoken.

She ate from the safehouse’s meager supplies- she needed somewhere better, what if something happened- and settled to look at what she had. She’d killed Calvin in 2011- what were the others even doing, then?

The realization that she hadn’t met Basira yet sunk cold in her gut. She’d anticipated not knowing Jon- it felt like a lifetime, but they hadn’t known each other long, and liked each other for even less- but she hadn’t prepared to lose the only other person who was  _ hers.  _ A howling echo of the Hunt surged up at the thought, urging her to find Basira  _ now, _ to bring her back here where Daisy could protect her. She crushed it down as brutally as she could.

Basira wasn’t even Sectioned yet. She could stop her from ever being Sectioned, if she wanted. She paged through notes on the Archives employees as she chewed over the notion, torn between wanting to keep Basira safe and to have her near. 

Daisy took a slow breath. There was so much, a constant buffet of emotions, more than she’d felt in a long time. It almost made her miss the simplicity of being wholly Hunter, thinking of nothing but the chase. She could handle responsibility, she was used to it, but it so rarely hit her so close to home.

She tried to focus on the state of the others. Jon and Martin were already working at the Institute- she’d barely missed her chance to keep Jon away, and part of her cursed herself for not finding a way to return a little earlier. She couldn’t do much about it now, couldn’t risk drawing Magnus’- Bouchard’s?- attention so soon. She realized with a chill that she was the only one in this time who knew the key to a successful Ritual. She couldn’t seek out Jon, or try to get him to  quit, she couldn’t risk facing Bouchard- better to call him that, when his real name set a superstitious chill up her spine, as if using it might draw his Eye- and having him pluck the secret from her mind.

The rest were living normal lives, their own encounters with the paranormal long over or far in the future. She wouldn’t get a chance before Basira- if she was going to protect any of them from the Fears, she had to decide whether it was worth losing  _ her _ . She knew the right choice, but the selfish, clawing part of her didn’t want to make it. 

Daisy rocked back on her heels, scanning her notes on Statements. She told herself she wasn’t looking for a Hunt, but could she afford the risk of wasting away, when there was no one else to shoulder her burden, now? Surely it was better to lose herself if it meant saving the world. She remembered the quiet of the coffin, both temptation and terror, and the tired hunger and pride of giving up the Chase. If she gave in, would there be enough of herself left to carry out her mission in the first place?

She didn’t have answers, and she didn’t have anyone but herself to ask. Daisy had always been the solitary type, especially after Calvin changed, but the magnitude of losing Jon and Basira in one go, along with the friendly-if-not-close companionship of the others, and the task in front of her felt enormously lonely. She read the Statements with greater fervor, trying to hide from that part of herself.

She didn’t know what she was looking for until she found it. She’d felt all the emotion and terror of the information as she’d spilled it onto the page, similar to how Jon had described reading Statements, the way she’d seen borrowed fear flicker over his face as he spoke in a voice that wasn’t quite his own, but she hadn’t been in a state to pay attention, before.

A wave of loss and aching sadness, close to what she felt but foreign all the same, hit her as she read over one outline. It wasn’t like the thirdhand emotion the others shuddered with, nearer and more real than Jon’s mental translation of his perception of another’s fear. It didn’t even make sense, as she examined her memory of the Statement, more detailed than the spare outline in the notebook and carrying more of that strange guilt and mourning. The contents of the Statement itself didn’t match the emotion, more tired acceptance than fear or sorrow. 0173006. What made it different?

A small part of Daisy recognized that the curiosity was strange for her, deeper than she usually felt, but the rest was consumed by the need to know what set Gerard Keay’s Statement apart. Jon had taken it live, for a given value of the word, but that couldn’t be it- she sought out the outlines and memories of his other live Statements, and while some carried the same too-real emotion, it was far from universal. And live Statements weren’t the only ones that sparked feeling like that.

She combed through all of her notes again, paying close attention to what they made her feel. There, alongside and partly hidden by her own feelings, worry and care echoed from the accounts of the Archive Assistants’ lives. Mirrored hate bubbled as she read her notes on the Head of the Institute. Had something found her out already? Sent some creature to play with her emotions, pull her strings? If so, why would they leave their influence so obvious?

It was the notebook filled with sports scores that made things click. It went back years, back to a couple months before Daisy had even been born, and letting her eyes skim over it gave her a swell of caring and desperate hope that made her think of afternoons spent with Jon, making him listen to The Archers, limbs tangled enough to feel each other but not enough to bring back memories of crushing dirt. She could almost see his soft, self-deprecating smile, always ready to hurl himself into danger for the sake of others.

Were the strange emotions an echo of Jon? It made more sense, and thinking of the sad Statements in terms of people he didn’t save felt true in the same part of her that felt the cloying guilt.  _ Couldn’t save _ , the part of her that had become so used to derailing Jon’s spirals insisted- some of the Statements happened long before he became the Archivist, before he would have had the slightest chance of helping.

But Daisy had that chance, and she realized what Jon would be doing, if he’d been the one sent back. Helping people was never her wheelhouse; she hunted down monsters, but revenge for past victims and protection for those yet to come was her excuse, not her motivation. Jon, her Jon, the one she’d bled and bickered with, put everything he had into helping people he barely knew or liked (who’d tried to kill him, her self-recriminations insisted). Even if she wouldn’t ever see him again, not really, she could do this for his memory (that made it sound like he was dead. Was he, if she altered circumstances so that the man she’d known never had reason to become himself? Was she, in some way, killing her Jon? Don’t think about that, focus on the mission).

The idea felt good, and she set to combing through the Statements for those that hadn’t happened yet, paying special attention to the ones that made secondhand grief pool in her chest. Did she risk feeding the Hunt, doing this? Did it matter? After the feeling of wasting hunger snapping back to fevered clarity when she finally gave in, after being so transformed between the Change and Jon digging her Self out of the monster again, she wasn’t sure she  _ could _ resist it, at least entirely. Not alone. And in some small way, using the Statements to save innocents from the Fears’ grip was starving them out as well. Even if she couldn’t do much to act against the Institute yet, she could do  _ this. _


	3. Daisy, May-June 2011

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for some body horror surrounding what happens when you light a corruption avatar on fire

It felt unreal, to gather her notebooks and return to her old flat. As she mechanically set about preparing to return to work- she’d decided not to quit, the lack of oversight and authority the police gave her outweighing the drain on her time or the fear of the Hunt, at least for now- it started to set in that this body, her body, was not one she knew anymore.

Her hair brushed her chin and drifted strands into her eyes. She’d liked the style because she thought it made her face softer, more feminine. She’d buzzed it short at some point on the reasoning that longer hair might get in the way on Hunts. These muscles had never atrophied for months in the Buried, or twisted into a creature of teeth and claws. When she took a proper shower, she shivered with the sense memory of dirt and weeks of apocalyptic grime this skin had never been caked in. There were flakes of purple polish clinging to her nails. Daisy couldn’t remember the last time she’d used nail polish, in the old world. There were a couple of skirts in her closet, reminders of a self she hadn’t been for years, but the thought of wearing them made her smile. 

It felt good. Her strength now was her own- even if it had been developed in service to or with the aid of the Hunt, she’d built it the human way, not been bulked up from skin and bones into a predator’s litheness. Her last day before returning to work, she went to the gym. She’d let her membership lapse after leaving the police, too focused on hunting the source of the Unknowing, and she hadn’t been around so many people in a long time. She liked it, even if the noise of so many people existing in one place without fear sometimes made her skittish.

She continued her experiments into the distant camaraderie of people existing alongside each other when she ventured to a sports bar that evening to watch the football match she’d chosen for her first test of Jon’s prognostications (the rest was accurate, but she wasn’t quite willing to trust him unquestioningly on something like sports). The crowd was a bit rowdier and pressed closer than at the gym, but she counted it as a victory that she didn’t respond to the jostling by lashing out, and the small bet she’d used Jon’s information for paid off enough to pay for her drinks.. She felt in control in a way she hadn’t been for years. 

Returning to work brought the little scraps of happiness she’d pulled from the pieces of her old self tumbling down into a sour pit in her stomach the moment she looked over to Basira’s desk and saw its current occupant. She didn’t know whether he’d met the grim fate of so many Sectioned officers or just traded with Basira so she could be closer to Daisy, but he wasn’t her partner. Basira wasn’t there.

She clenched her fists until the pain of her nails digging into the meat of her palms brought her back to the present. She had a job to do, and it had nothing to do with the gym or nail polish or remembering the slide of a brush through long hair. She set to researching the first changes she intended to make to this time, grief and anger channeled into aggressive focus. 

Something easy, to start with, though she wouldn’t, couldn’t, let that conception make her sloppy. Elias had forced the image of Corruption overtaking her father’s nursing home on Melanie, the first time around. From other Statements, she knew where the Avatar of Filth who’d caused it would be in a couple weeks, hopefully before he ever laid eyes on Ivy Meadows Nursing Home, and how to take him out. Her success would have more to do with her own planning than anything else.

It was simple enough to double check the address where John Amherst would soon be terrorizing Jordan Kennedy, but looking for background on the man was harder. It would be simpler if she could find a previous incident, something to justify taking action against him if her superiors ever brought it up, but the name was common enough and his MO far enough from the criminal that she settled for quietly inserting his name into a few old Sectioned cases that came close enough. Nothing she hadn’t done before. By the time she climbed into her car (with its empty passenger seat) to answer a call that dispatch had thought sounded odd but she knew from her first experience would need a psychiatrist more than a Sectioned officer, some of the tension had diffused.

The bulk of her research over the weeks leading up to the confrontation went into looking for ways to combine a stab vest with her new hazmat suit- what would she do without the internet?- or strengthen the material of the suit itself. She didn’t intend to go down like Dekker- she wondered what he might do, with his old death averted. The man sounded like he’d make a good Hunter.

-

She wasn’t wholly confident in the location she’d chosen to stake out John Amherst’s Bromley house. She had protective gear layered over her clothes, and the sight of that would likely counteract any protection from suspicion the markings identifying her car as a police car might give her, especially in the kind of neighborhood where people noticed an infestation in their neighbor’s house. She had everything she needed, kitted out like some kind of medical supersoldier with layers of plastic protecting the inside of the boot and a rented cement truck waiting a ways outside the city. All there was to do was wait.

She hated waiting. She was meant for the chase, and the stillness that preceded it made her skin crawl with impatience. It was worse, knowing there wouldn’t even be much of a chase at the end of it if she’d done her job right. She’d figured that if Jordan Kennedy had made it out alright the first go round there was no reason she couldn’t wait for him to light Amherst on fire now, give her the advantage, but it’d barely get her blood pumping.

She’d put everything up to her neck on ahead of time, planning to don the mask, goggles, and hood when Kennedy arrived, but she almost regretted it, sweating in the early summer sun. She slumped a bit in relief when the pest control van pulled up, and the rubbery, sweat-slick suit squeaked. Gross.

Watching Kennedy pull on his gear and enter the house gave her an odd sense of deja vu. She’d never seen this before, but at the same time she’d lived every moment of it a hundred times over- or the Archivist had, and Jon passed the memory on to her. She resisted the urge to slap at her skin, the phantom sensation of a horde of crawling ants creeping beneath her gear. She nearly cheered when another car pulled up, so badly rusted that she was surprised it was still moving. 

Daisy watched dispassionately as Amherst pulled Kennedy up by the neck, yelling something she couldn’t quite make out, and Kennedy set the Avatar alight. She waited until Amherst was smoldering on the driveway and Kennedy’s van had pulled away to start over, fire extinguisher in one hand, syringe full of pesticide in the other, and a duffle bag of extra supplies slung over her shoulder.

She wrinkled her nose as she dropped the duffle bag and started to spray Amherst down. He’d gone up with the readiness of a vampire, but resembled neither the neat piles of ash they tended to leave nor a proper burnt body. Sections of his skin pitted and sputtered something oily and rancid, looking almost like a honeycomb, though thankfully nothing came crawling out. The whole mess smelled even worse than she’d anticipated.

The body twitched as she administered the pesticide cocktail and pulled out her supply of extra large plastic garbage bags- she hadn’t known they made them in sizes large enough to shove a body in, but on making the discovery had decided it would do just as well as something medical grade, and be less difficult to acquire. She was careful not to let the heat of the body melt any of her gear. She didn’t take the same care with the bags; it was faintly satisfying to watch the first couple warp and melt into what was left of the skin. 

She wrapped Amherst in plastic until the shape was no longer identifiable as human, then bound the whole thing in sturdy cord. He weighed a bit more than she thought he ought to, carrying him to the boot. 

Daisy let herself hum along to the radio as she set out for the place she’d chosen for Amherst’s tomb. It really was a lovely day, aside from the smell (was it clinging to her or seeping in from the boot? Either way, she was starting to wonder if it’d be better to plan an “accident” for the car and get it replaced) and so far things had gone off without a hitch. Halfway there thumping noises started to come from the boot, Amherst evidently recovered enough to realize at least some of his situation, but she didn’t let it bother her. 

Her luck held as she heaved him back out of the boot (he thrashed around and had made some progress tearing the bags, but didn’t manage to undo his binds or inflict any damage on Daisy herself. He was yelling something, she assumed either dire threats or pleas for his life, but she paid no attention) and set about encasing him in a block of concrete. Even if Dekker was wrong, and it didn’t hold, it’d at least work long enough to keep Melanie’s dad safe. 

Watching cement dry wasn’t particularly gripping, but she found it satisfying enough as she started the process of disinfecting and piling up everything that had come into contact with Amherst. She heaped it all together, swapping the ratty clothes she’d worn under the hazmat suit for a set she’d wrapped in plastic for protection ahead of time. The lingering reek of the man she’d killed was not improved by the smell of burning cloth and plastic as she started up her bonfire. It made her doubly glad she’d found somewhere so isolated to do the deed, and that she hadn’t chosen her usual dump site.

She’d intended to stay long enough to ensure everything had burned down to ash and the concrete was well and truly set, despite the smell, but it was starting to give her a headache. She figured it wouldn’t do any harm if she ducked out early- it wasn’t as though anyone but her knew where to look, even if they did want to come to a disgusting animal like Amherst’s aid. She was about to turn the key in her ignition when she glanced at her foot, still hanging out the open door to rest in the grass, and saw a spider skitter over the toe of her boot.

Her mind pulled up a dozen stories of control and manipulation, the feeling of hands being pulled inexorably toward a door. Her own hands jerked, torn between completing their action and freezing. Daisy dug her teeth into her lip, hard enough to draw blood, and reached for her gun instead of doing either. She pulled herself out of the car and searched for a sign of any other life. 

She didn’t allow herself to startle at the sound of clapping, coming from behind her. The sound stayed behind her even when she turned to face it, ready to pounce at any especially-humanoid shadows. It only stayed in place when she stopped whirling about trying to spot the source.

It didn’t take long to connect the sight of the thin Black woman rounding into view at a leisurely stroll that matched the pace of her applause, with her bleached hair trimmed close to her scalp, to the appropriate description from the Statements. She hadn’t been an Avatar for long- the side of her head, thick with cobweb, still caved inward sickeningly, not built far enough out to give the guise of normalcy. 

“That was very impressive!” Annabelle Cane said brightly. “Not many can resist the Mother’s pull like that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact! in my original outline of this story, annabelle's name occurs zero (0) times! she invited herself.
> 
> if you have any britpicks to offer feel free to leave them in the comments, i'm very american and just doing my best based off of what wikipedia and the like can tell me


	4. Annabelle, 30 June 2011

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: since this all takes place on a single day, I figured it should have a proper date, but since the statement I'm pulling from doesn't give one more specific than 2011... it's just my birthday now. John Amherst is getting his spot blown up, and meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic bitty me is being given an entire pan of bar cookies to eat by herself and getting ready to see a community theater production of 42nd street.

Annabelle’s first encounter with the Web had come from her desire to supersede her siblings in the eyes of their parents. She’d caught glimpses of them on the news after she took her new place in the world, those first months of adjustment, begging her to return and insisting that whatever happened couldn’t have been her fault. Everything she’d wanted as a child, and now she had no use for it. She had a new Mother now.

She would never be the most important, in the Mother’s eyes, but the invisible hands that caressed her strings and directed her actions felt so loving it didn’t matter. To be most important to the Mother, to have all the love and attention of the Web focused on her and her alone, sounded like unbearable bliss.

She had trouble conceptualizing the terror that had driven her to volunteer for the study, now. In retrospect, with spiders as her constant companions, crawling through her skull and tangling web in her hair, her fear seemed almost quaint. The Mother only wanted what was best for her, she saw that now.

In half a year with the Web, Annabelle had become used to following when she felt the strings at her wrists and ankles and neck pull her somewhere, giving her direction from something beyond comprehension. Usually, she was left to her own devices, but whenever she was called to take care of something specifically it was important. Seeing the smoke, she had assumed that this time she would find one of the Lightless Flame. The idea struck a bit of fear in her heart- webs burned so easily, after all- but her trust in the Mother kept her moving forward.

It was a surprise and a relief to find a Hunter instead, a trembling thread leashed around the woman’s throat with no endpoint in sight. Annabelle had had few dealings with the Hunt as yet, but even a human could lead a dog. A single spider should have been more than enough to ensure her future actions were watched, in case the Mother took an interest again.

Annabelle didn’t allow herself to hesitate, when the Hunter’s eyes landed on her spider with uncanny sharpness and the woman shook off Annabelle’s control and drew her gun. She wished her first encounter with the Hunt wasn’t with a member who was also police- it complicated things. If it came to a confrontation, she was determined to do the Mother proud. It was probably her fault, anyway, her inexperience letting the Hunter slip from her control, she told herself even as a thread at the core of her being juddered with backlash from the strength of the compulsion and the Mother’s presence prickled with interest.

She still had enough control over the situation to make an entrance. The Hunter’s teeth gleamed and her eyes sharpened at the compliment and the acknowledgement that she had been controlled, but Annabelle barrelled on before she could respond. “Annabelle Cane. I’m  _ sure  _ it’s a pleasure to meet you…?” 

She put her hand out to shake, and the Hunter stiffened at how close she’d gotten. She ignored the gesture, fingers tightening on her gun. “Don’t see how it’s any of your business.”

Annabelle pouted and crossed her arms, allowing a flicker of extra limbs to tease the edges of the Hunter’s sight. “How rude!” The Mother started feeding her what she could of the situation- she liked to keep her children informed. After all, it was difficult to manipulate the pieces if you didn’t know what game you were playing. 

Annabelle glanced over the scene as though the rancid-smelling bonfire and block of drying concrete had only just caught her attention, chewing over the information and deciding how best to deploy it. She didn’t get a chance to before the Hunter spoke again. 

“What are you doing here?”

Annabelle answered the question with another. “Why did you want John Amherst dead so badly you staked out his house for hours? Not much of a  _ chase  _ in an ambush.” A spider that had lurked at the edge of the yard, growing fat off of the ants that strayed from Filth’s mass, had observed as much.

The Hunter curled her lip, but Annabelle had her threads hooked more securely now, playing on the other woman’s curiosity and the part of her that saw Annabelle as potential prey to keep her rooted to the spot. Eventually, she’d have to say something. Even the most misanthropic would cave to the pressure of an uncomfortable silence eventually.

It took barely any tugging at all, in fact, for the Hunter to sigh. “Chase didn’t matter. Stopping him hurting people did.” Something there- she was trying to convince herself almost as much as she was Annabelle.

Annabelle widened her eyes theatrically. She wished she’d had time to replace her wardrobe. She just couldn’t have the same effect, wearing a hoodie and jeans, as she had Before in heels and petticoats. “Not something I ever expected to hear from a Hunter!” She latched onto the bit that growled at being termed such. “Or are you still trying to convince yourself the killing is all for a noble cause?” It seemed the easiest explanation, what with the police affiliation. She rocked up on her toes, affecting eagerness. “It doesn’t have to be, you know. Giving in can be  _ so  _ much more fun. Why keep pretending?”

The Hunter lashed out with her free hand, less a coordinated attack that a slash of nails and anger. Annabelle leaped back. “Alright!” She let herself show a bit of fear. Letting the Hunter know how new to this she was might gain her some wiggle room, and it would certainly plant the seed of doubt in her mind, that she’d only broken the compulsion because of that. Better to keep her wary of the full power of the Web. “I’m sorry!”

“What do you want.” It wasn’t a question so much as a demand. 

Annabelle gave a loose shrug. “The Mother was curious.  _ I  _ was curious. It’s not every day you see someone as old as Amherst… neutralized. Why him? Why  _ now _ ?” 

“Monster’s a monster.” The Hunter’s eyes sought out Annabelle’s jugular, the concavity of her skull, her stance, all implicit threat and coiled muscle. “Monsters need killing. Don’t care who they are.” There was something off about the statement, some fault in her conviction, but the Web was not the Eye. If Annabelle wanted to know the truth behind the lie, she’d have to work for it.

“And yourself?”

The Hunter glared. “Don’t know what you mean.” Annabelle didn’t need to be Beholding’s to see the lie there, the tension building in the Hunter’s shoulders. “Why do  _ you _ care? Can’t imagine the spiders had any great plan for him, unless it was as a buffet, so you may as well piss off.”

“Just curious, like I said. An awful lot of planning went into catching him like this; I’d almost think you were one of ours! Someone useful and interesting, certainly.” The Hunter stiffened, eyes flickering in search of spiders that weren’t there and threads she couldn’t see. Annabelle smiled broadly. “I can be a useful ally, as well.” 

The Hunter blew a harsh breath, nostrils flaring. Annabelle wondered if she’d caught her scent. She wasn’t particularly worried, but a Hunter on her doorstep could complicate things. She needed to do this delicately, if it was going to work, and she grasped for the Mother like a nervous child. “The Filth was no friend of ours, as you said, and I can’t say I’m sad to see poor old John go. It’d be a shame if someone made their way out here and decided to chip open that block. I could make sure that didn’t happen. I’ll even keep an eye on things here, let you get back to your day.”

Something in the other woman shifted at the name, made her even more tense. Odd. There were no threads between her and her victim; Annabelle would be surprised to learn they’d ever met before today, if the Hunter’s efficient takedown could be termed a meeting. If it weren’t for Amherst’s age and experience, Annabelle would think the Hunter was even newer than she herself, feeding her god anything from something brief and impersonal as that. She’d expect more toying with her prey. The Hunter gave a tiny, derisive laugh, pulling Annabelle’s attention back from the peculiarity. “And what were you going to ask in return?”

Annabelle gave her a guileless look. “Nothing! A favor, to a potential friend.”

The Hunter laughed harder. “No  _ strings  _ attached? Come on.” 

Annabelle’s smile sharpened. “Next time we see each other, we have a conversation instead of you attacking me, and we’ll call it even.”

The Hunter swayed with indecision- it may have been internal, but to Annabelle it was as visible as any change in her rock-steady stance. Did all Hunter’s eyes have that air of sharp perceptiveness? Just as she was about to pluck a thread, pull the encounter in her own favor….

“Fine.” She holstered the gun and climbed back into her car, running a hand over the seats and kicking her feet in the wheel well, flicking the spider she found tucked behind a door handle to the grass outside. Her sharp eyes found Annabelle in the rear-view; Annabelle gave no reaction to her spy’s discovery as she drove off toward the road without another word. There were plenty more hiding elsewhere. 

Annabelle waved cheerily until the car was out of sight. Then she set to weaving.

It would be easy to simply draw attention away from the spot, but hardly entertaining. Once the more metaphysical side of things was complete, Annabelle set to poking around the clearing as her spiders encased the area in literal webs as well. Dozens more would come to make their homes here over the coming days, all types crowded together, keeping meddlers from their charge. Anyone who did disturb them would be in for a nasty surprise. The thought brought a smile to her face.

-

She’d  _ anticipated  _ the Hunter trying to eliminate her spiders more thoroughly, once she felt safely out of reach, but the woman was disappointingly effective. Only one tiny money spider escaped her search, tucked away inside the locking mechanism for the boot. Still, where there was one spider Annabelle could direct more, allowing her to get a grasp on the Hunter’s habits and personality. She was careful to keep her influence away from the woman’s sharp eyes; promise or no, she doubted she could come away from their next encounter unscathed if the Hunter noticed a sudden proliferation of cobwebs.

Tiny spy network established, Annabelle allowed the Hunter to slip from her thoughts. There were other concerns, and her Mother would draw her attention back when it mattered.


	5. Daisy, 30 June 2011

She flexed her hands on the steering wheel as she left Annabelle Cane behind. She felt off-kilter. The hunt had been successful, even if it did almost nothing to feed the howling void within (that was  _ good,  _ she reminded herself) and then suddenly the Web was there, poking around her dump site and prodding some plan Daisy couldn’t see into motion. Had she been discovered already? Was that why Cane had used Amherst’s first name, to needle Daisy into revealing something? How much did she know? Better Cane than Bouchard, she supposed, but she’d expected to have more  _ time _ , to be able to put things in motion without looking over her shoulder for at least a while longer. Even if she didn’t know, Cane had identified her as a Hunter at a glance. Was she already too far gone? Was the whole enterprise doomed to fail because of a corruption inside Daisy herself?

She hadn’t wanted to leave Cane alone there, but she couldn’t risk her taking a no as an affront and letting Amherst loose instead, or worse. She’d return later, to make sure things remained in order.

When she spotted a petrol station she pulled in and set to combing over her car for any trace of spiders. She felt like a less glamorous version of the scene in a spy movie where they search for listening devices, but if anyone else saw her there she probably just looked crazy. 

It wasn’t until she’d returned home, showered, and swiped down any cobwebs she found with extreme prejudice that she allowed herself to flick through her secondhand memories of Cane. She’d been more confident, the pull of her webs stronger, the few times Jon had interacted with her, but fundamentally the same. She’d taunted him more than once with the idea that every terror of the Web was self-inflicted, and then with the possibility that she only wanted him to think that. Was Daisy somehow playing into the Web’s hands by trying to avoid them? She hadn’t had much of an opinion before, other than a general disgust and unease around spiders cultivated by her time Sectioned, but she was rapidly coming to hate the Web with a particular passion. 

She set her notebooks down on the kitchen table with the most satisfying  _ bang _ she could wring out of the paper and cardboard (not very) and set to looking for her next task, chewing furiously on a protein bar. Searching out information from among the heaps of data and aligning it with other knowledge had given her a thrill of satisfaction, researching Amherst, but she couldn’t quite order her thoughts. She was unwilling to be seen dealing with anything too closely associated with the Institute, even only as it existed in her future, while there was a chance Cane was watching, but there might be a lead on some minor monster she could track down to divert suspicion. She was focused so intently on trying to keep her anger and frustration from blurring the scrawled words that she didn’t notice the creak of a door beside her. 

“Hello, Hunter!”

If asked why she’d startled so hard she fell off her chair, Daisy would offer the defense that she could hardly be expected to operate at full cognitive capacity around the Spiral. She figured the same extended to the ineloquence of her response. “What the hell?”

It seemed silly and redundant to call the Distortion impossible, but it was the only word Daisy could think to put to the figure before her. She’d met it, heard descriptions of what it was like before, inherited Jon’s memories of their encounters, but none of that lined up with what she saw before her. The Distortion, grinning and taking a seat on the edge of her table, seemed unlikely to offer an explanation unprompted. Daisy huffed. “Why are you  _ Helen _ ?” 

The twisted figure gave her an exaggerated frown as Daisy climbed to her feet. “Why are  _ you _ Daisy?” 

“You know what I mean. You shouldn’t be-” it probably wasn’t the most productive thing to tell the Distortion it shouldn’t be possible, even if she was right, “You should still be Michael.”

Helen waved a hand. “I am, mostly.” She met Daisy’s eyes, but Daisy had to look away after a moment gazing into the shifting technicolor irises. Helen was making no effort to look more human today. “But I’ve told Jon before: time is difficult, for me. It wasn’t  _ so  _ difficult to take advantage of the twist that brought you here to come along for the ride, although it has taken some effort to find you. I don’t suppose you’d like to take a tour of my hallways, make things a bit easier on me?” She gestured invitingly to the yellow door which still hung open beside Daisy’s pantry.

“No thanks. What do you want?” This was worse than the  _ probability _ of Annabelle Cane knowing where she’d come from; with Helen it was a certainty, and she couldn’t Hunt the Distortion. “Are you going to try to stop me?”

Helen let out a grating laugh. “No! I’ll explain, though it goes against my nature; I don’t have much time.” She looked expectantly to Daisy instead of continuing. After a long beat of silence she raised an eyebrow. “‘Thank you, Helen!’”

“Thanks, Helen,” Daisy begrudgingly repeated. Helen laughed again.

“I’m here to ask a favor, actually. When I saw you were trying again, of course I had to tag along. I’d hoped you’d go back far enough to give me another chance at my Ritual; I know the secret, now.” Her eyes glittered dangerously, and Daisy shuddered at the idea. She never would have predicted Helen’s interference, if that had happened; she’d lose the world and likely not even know why. “But even without that, your Archives were the most interesting thing to happen to me in  _ ages _ , and I’d much rather watch what new twists you can come up with to stop the Eye and wait a few more centuries for another chance at a ritual than be Beholding’s subject.”

“What’s the favor, Helen.” She had a feeling they were being drawn off-track.

“Hm. Not so much a favor as a deal. I know you’re going through your Archivist’s Statements, saving whoever you can. I want an exception.”

“Why, and why would I give you one?” She was starting to get a headache, from the conversation and this whole exhausting day.

“I’m able to be here, talking with you, because Helen always fit the Spiral better than Michael. I was able to… we’ll say  _ hijack  _ our Self for a bit, but it won’t last long. Michael is a part of us in a way Helen isn’t, now. I want you to leave Helen Richardson to walk through my door, just like she did last time.” 

She didn’t need Jon’s feelings to know he’d considered Helen one of his greatest failures. The guilt had overwhelmed every line of his body whenever they spoke. She was ready to reject the idea out of hand, but Helen barreled on. “ _ In exchange _ , I’ll let things stay as they did: Helen Richardson will go to the Archivist and give her Statement, just as she did last time. She liked Jon. He was kind. Michael  _ hates  _ the current Archivist, and he’ll have  _ no  _ trouble transferring that feeling to Jon once he takes up the mantle.”

“He’s not going to!” Daisy snapped. She may not be able to get him away from the Institute, but she wasn’t going to let Jon fall into the trap that had caused him so much pain before.

Helen rolled her eyes, an action that seemed to make the room spin along with them. “Whatever you say, Hunter.  _ If he does _ you can have Michael, who would have killed him if Helen hadn’t Become us instead, and no guarantee he’ll make that move in a way the Spiral dislikes enough to replace him,  _ or  _ you can have Helen.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “I  _ like  _ Jon. We’d be  _ great  _ friends, if he’d just drop the hang-ups and let loose once in a while!  _ I’ll  _ help you keep him safe, and keep Beholding from winning.” 

Daisy did not reflect Helen’s delighted grin. “And what are you getting out of this?”

Helen sat up again and gave a liquid shrug. “Besides the chance to swap the Eye’s Ritual for my own, some day? Helen fits better than Michael. The only reason Michael Became us was because he was so utterly unsuited to it. I get to be comfortable, you get to keep your Archivist safe. It’s a win-win. If I do manage to get the Great Untwisting right, no one you know will live long enough to see it. Just leave Helen Richardson to walk into my corridors when the time’s right, without interference. Do we have a deal?”

If she said yes, there was no guarantee Helen would abide by those terms. It wasn’t called  _ Twisting Deceit  _ for nothing. But if she said no, Helen might decide to dispose of her on the spot. Or Michael might- the edges of Helen’s black hair were beginning to blur blonde, and her shape seemed to flicker moment to moment even more than usual. All else aside, Daisy didn’t think she’d lied about having a limited time to talk. “I’ll think about it.”

Helen beamed. “Pleasure doing business with you, Daisy! I’ll see you again when I’m back to myself! Bye!” She skipped back through her door and was gone, leaving only the conviction that Daisy  _ never  _ wanted to see the Distortion skip anywhere again and the creeping unease of another looming decision. 

With a groan she shoved the notebooks away and fell forward onto the table. She’d watch a movie or something, she couldn’t take any more of this today.

-

She was small, so small, and not a she at all, thin bones and oversized jumper balanced into the shape of a boy, and her hands were glued to a picture book. It was too young for him (her?) but he’d opened it anyway, and now it had him, fear and dread pooling in his stomach as his hands turned the pages against the commands of his brain. He knew what came next (but she’d never read this book before, had she?) and his hands trembled as he prepared to knock.

“What’s this?” A large hand pulled the book from his unresisting fingers while its twin shoved him to the ground. He laid where he fell, thoughts too misty to act. The older boy was familiar, but he couldn’t remember his name (the mix of familiar-not-familiar set off a part of her that screamed  _ danger _ , that demanded  _ attack, chase, hunt, kill _ ) “Is Genius Jonny reading a kiddie book today? What, did that grandmother of yours finally drop baby boy on his head?”

The words’ sting was removed by the feeling that he did not exist inside himself (had she taken his place, or had they both been shoved aside to make room for web and dust?) along with the residual fear. He could only watch as the older boy lifted the book to examine it more closely and his eyes went glassy, his jaw slack as he started to read. 

He picked himself up, brushing bits of gravel from his skinned knees. He didn’t run home, or call for help. If he called for help, what happened next wouldn’t be his fault, but he wouldn’t get to  _ see _ . The same selfish curiosity drove him to follow as the boy took jerky steps down the road and rested the book against the door. He peered around a corner as the boy knocked and the door opened wide.

He wanted to run, should have run (it didn’t happen this way what was going on) after gargantuan legs reached out and pulled the boy inside to be devoured, but the same invisible strings that had kept him reading pulled him toward the still-open door.

Mr. Spider was even bigger than he’d thought, and he dabbed blood from his chelicerae with one leg and tipped his bowler hat with another, gesturing him inside. Panic pounded in his ears, he wanted to be  _ anywhere _ but here, but he stepped across the threshold-

And she was back in her own body, her old body, earth-weakened bones moved by Hunter’s ferocity, and the sky was watching her run. She was holding Jon’s hand, and she couldn’t let go or he’d fall behind. Part of her screamed with the indignity and fear of being made prey. 

She tripped into what was still mostly a building, feet snagging on broken concrete just enough to jar Jon’s fingers from hers (where was  _ Basira _ ? Where were the others?) and she heard him fall. Daisy turned and watched as Jon picked himself up.

“Jon, we have to keep going, it’s almost here!” She held out a hand; suddenly it felt like she could not step through the doorway and take his, her feet rooted in place. It was going to catch them!

Jon picked himself up from the ruined ground, scarred and with a trickle of blood running down his cheek. He laughed tiredly. “There’s no point, Daisy. It’ll all come out the same in the end.”

Instead of taking her hand, Jon took a wobbly step back the way they came, and Daisy caught her first glimpse of their pursuer. It was Mr. Spider, of course it was, and he needed more to fill his tremendous belly. Jon staggered toward him and was taken up in his monstrous arms, lifted to his mouth, and Daisy screamed and the sky watched and-

-

She didn’t wake from the dream quickly enough to make it from her bed to the bathroom. Daisy spent the remainder of her night replacing the sheets on her bed and cleaning vomit from the carpet and mattress. When the practicalities were taken care of, she sat awake and tried not to think of blood or crawling, spinning legs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you enjoyed comments, kudos, or come find me @inklingofadream on tumblr to yell about what might be coming next or look at what random meta gets reblogged into my #ttab inspo tag!


	6. Basira, August 2011

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know nothing about how UK police work and I don't intend to learn :/
> 
> Shorter and later than usual bc I had hella essays to write last week, but on the other hand- Basira's here!

Basira had thought that the reaction to someone having to speak to Detective Bright was odd and most likely overblown, but now that she was actually in the station she was starting to see it. Whatever unspoken stigma made this station different from the others seemed to weigh on everyone inside. Tension hung in the air, more than the usual anxiety of paperwork and quotas and limited resources. No one leaned across their desk to instigate a bit of friendly conversation, and most of the officers seemed unwilling to make eye contact with each other. 

She ignored the eyes she felt on her as she spoke with the friendly and thankfully normal receptionist. Detective Bright was unavailable, but she dutifully took down the information the receptionist gave her. Hopefully he’d be willing to meet somewhere other than here. Hopefully the next time someone needed to come here Basira would no longer be the newest and youngest. 

As she turned to leave, eager to escape the oppressive atmosphere, one of the strange detectives nearly bowled her over. The woman was tall and blonde, her nails painted but chipped, a lovely shade of blue. She held herself stiffly. “Sorry, sorry!”

“It’s fine.” Basira took a half step back, putting polite distance between them. The detective’s hands twitched at her sides and her eyes searched Basira’s face. “Happens to everyone sometimes.” 

“Right.” The woman seemed to be struggling for words, and Basira brushed her hands down her front, removing nonexistent dust, preparing to take advantage of the pause to extricate herself from the detectives’ over-bright eyes and claustrophobic station.

The other woman seemed to find her voice before she had the chance. “You don’t belong here. I mean! You’re not assigned to this station.” The woman’s sharp features and sharper gaze were fixed on her and filled with something soft and desperate, belying the rude words. 

Basira huffed a tiny laugh, trying to smooth over the awkward bluntness, and the detective’s eyes lit up. “No, I just needed to speak with one of your detectives, heard he might have material on a suspect we’re looking into.”

“Ah. Anything I can do to help?” Was she  _ blushing _ ? 

“No, thanks.” Basira wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

“Well, if that changes, you can ask anyone around here for Daisy and they’ll know where to find me.” Something complicated and unidentifiable flashed across the detective’s face before smoothing into the tense, purposely flat expression she’d worn for their entire conversation.

“Daisy?” Basira quirked an eyebrow.

“Detective Tonner! Alice. Tonner. But everyone calls me Daisy.” She was definitely blushing. Basira wouldn’t have put a name like “Daisy” to such a brutal-faced woman, whose muscles coiled with readiness even as she shifted awkwardly on her feet, but something about it seemed to fit nonetheless.

“PC Basira Hussain.” Basira put out a hand to shake. Her hand was small in Daisy’s firm grip. Her hand was scarred and calloused, and the handshake lasted a bit longer than was typical. Daisy’s hand twitched toward Basira again when it ended.

“Nice meeting you.” The handshake seemed to have put Daisy even more off-kilter, and she shuddered slightly.

“Yeah, nice meeting you, Daisy.” Basira smiled at her and stepped away, headed out of the station.

-

“He wasn’t in.” She tossed the torn-out notebook page with Bright’s information onto her current partner’s desk. “I can’t believe you made me go there alone. What’s the deal with that station?”

John grimaced and half-shrugged. “Better not to ask. Let the odd ones keep to themselves.” Basira was far from satisfied with that answer, but she could tell she wouldn’t be getting much more from John. She gave him her best unimpressed look. She’d have to prod some of her other coworkers, later.

“You can be the one to call Bright, then.” Basira wasn’t sure she wanted to meet another of the “odd ones” after her conversation with Detective Tonner, whose stare had seemed to follow her out of the station for far longer than it should have.

John grimaced, holding the page at arm’s length. “Maybe we should take this as a sign. Let sleeping dogs lie.” 

“What?” Basira couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She’d taken John Spencer for a man of integrity. 

“It’s only a minor burglary, Basira. Whatever Bright may or may not have would probably be a dead end anyway. Not a lot of cases that go to his lot ever get arrests.” The look in John’s eyes was fond and a little bit warning. Before she had appreciated the almost fatherly air John took with her, pleased to have him as a mentor figure for her first year on the job, but now it felt condescending.

“So we just let whoever did it get away with it?” Her voice was beginning to rise in indignation, pulling attention to them from others in the office.

John rubbed his forehead and sighed. “Look, you haven’t been here long enough to understand-”

“So explain it to me!”

But however she needled or demanded, John did nothing but shake his head and try to direct her onto other cases until they left the station for patrol.


	7. Daisy, August-September 2011

Daisy had convinced herself, after her near-disastrous conversation with Basira, that the other woman had visited her station the first time around and she simply hadn’t noticed. It felt innately  _ wrong _ to think that Basira could ever have entered her space and not drawn her focus like a lodestone, but it was better than the other option. When the high of seeing her partner again had faded, it had been all she could do to keep from falling apart with anxiety. 

She redirected as much of her focus as she could into preventing Basira from being Sectioned. Seeing her again, she couldn’t believe she’d ever considered doing otherwise. How long had it been since she saw Basira smile as genuinely as she did out of politeness to the receptionist? She was selfish, but she couldn’t live with herself if she was  _ that  _ selfish. Basira deserved happiness, and if that meant a life without Daisy in it, so be it.

Before Basira’s visit, she had been almost bored, cycling through work she’d barely cared about the first time she’d completed it, trying to acclimatize to the presence of other people when she went to the gym and trying to quash the part of her that hungered for a good chase. She’d almost wished something interesting would happen to break the ennui- there weren’t even any statements to intervene in for the rest of the summer, aside from Basira’s.

Part of her reveled in the feeling of urgency brought on by Basira’s visit. She was needed, she was protecting her people, maybe this time it would be a proper hunt. She wished she could tear that part out with claws she no longer had.

Once the decision to keep Basria away from Diego Molina was made, it took very little actual effort. For all her research and contingencies, all Daisy actually had to do was script a call with just enough oddities to get sent to a Sectioned officer right off, then find someone willing to dial 999 from a payphone and read it off. She found herself at loose ends often enough that it wasn’t even difficult to ensure that she was the one to respond.

It felt like checking items off a list. She didn’t even bother listening to Molina’s ranting, or reading the cover of the book she confiscated, just let the metal of the handcuffs burn her fingers enough to leave a mark and bundled him into her car. There was a fire extinguisher in the passenger wheel well if he wanted to be difficult.

She’d been sure to get a distinctive imprint of the cuffs when she let Molina burn her, and between that and her story- which she was pretty sure ended up containing a couple absent-minded quotes from Basira’s never-to-be-made Statement- her superiors were eager to shove a Section 31 at her and start trying to puzzle out what to do with Molina. She didn’t bother filing the book as evidence- she had a couple ideas of how to make better use of it than an evidence locker would, and no one paid attention to the evidence for Sectioned cases, anyway.

All in all, the entire experience was practically mundane, by her standards. If the burns were healed by the end of the work week, no one but Daisy needed to know. She was fully resigned to her efforts to change the future being restricted to brief moments of purpose is a dull void, and any future encounters with Basira down to chance or setting aside her sense of decency and potentially feeding the Hunt by stalking her. The knowledge that she had done her work well and Basira was safe to life a normal life would have to be enough. She would make it be enough. 

When, in mid-September, a few of the more boisterous officers started making a fuss about rearranging desks to fit in a newcomer, she didn’t bother paying attention. They were one of a handful of stations Sectioned officers tended to accumulate at sooner or later- the newest had a decent chance of quitting before Daisy learned their name. The uproar was familiar, all the greetings one might normally offer a new coworker, but tinged with the grim unspoken knowledge of the kind of thing they all had in common. 

She was annoyed when a presence loomed up near her desk, and more annoyed that she hadn’t noticed anyone approaching, half-lost in considering her next move. She was already working up a snarl that would discourage anyone from including her in their social niceties again when a familiar voice said, “Daisy, right?”

She didn’t know what expression her face had fallen into. It felt as though her gaze was being pulled upward without her input. She knew what she would see, ice in her gut.

She forced her expression into what she hoped passed as a smile and met the newcomers eyes. “That’s me. Basira, right?”

-

She had no idea if she acquitted herself well in her second (millionth) interaction with Basira. Most of the other  _ Sectioned  _ officers with years on the job had barely seen two or three actual Section 31s- Daisy was the exception only because she sought them out and had built a reputation. The chances of Basira encountering something after Daisy took care of Molina should have been infinitesimal. 

Basira had been reluctant to say anything about whatever led to her being Sectioned, but between gentle prodding of both her and their other coworkers, it sounded as though it had involved spiders and had resulted in the death of Basira’s partner. Daisy was an idiot for forgetting the Web, even for a moment, and now her negligence had doomed Basira. Unless nothing she could have done would have stopped her partner being Sectioned...

She’d been putting off returning to reexamine whatever remained of John Amherst, but this had her driving off as soon as she could justify it. Was everything she changed doomed to revert? Had Helen been so certain Jon would become the Archivist because she knew? Panic juddered alongside half-remembered dreams and the feeling of trying to pull herself up through the Buried only to be sucked back down.

By the time she arrived at the site where she’d left Annabelle Cane with what remained of John Amherst, she was moving from panic to numbness, mind burnt out with adrenaline she couldn’t redirect. It had been fairly unassuming when she’d chosen it, nothing that might draw attention to it over anywhere else. It wasn’t any more. 

Cobwebs completely swathed the clearing, forming an almost solid wall, their inhabitants dark spots moving through the layers of silk. She jogged back to her car for her torch, and when she shined it onto the mass she could see the light catch on the faint outline of the concrete slab. It looked undamaged from where she stood, and she wasn’t willing to go closer and risk disturbing any of the spiders. Amherst was still where she’d left him. He couldn’t have been to Ivy Meadows Nursing Home. She’d changed at least that much.

That left the question of why she hadn’t been able to keep Basira safe. She was unwilling to chalk anything up to coincidence with the Web so clearly involved in both her mission and Basira’s Section 31. If she wanted answers, Annabelle Cane would be a good start, and if the avatar didn’t want to give them Daisy would  _ change her mind _ . Even without any information more recent than her last encounter with the woman, she would be able to ferret out whatever hiding place spiders crawled back to drive her out and chase her down until Annabelle would be desperate, ready to do anything to stop her pursuit.

She almost didn’t catch the train of her thoughts. When she did she nearly wrecked the car. 

She hadn’t felt the Hunt that powerfully since before she came back. Was it because she had always been willing to carve off pieces of herself if it was for Basira, the tangle of care-longing-lonely-need-protect that surrounded every thought of her partner blinding her to its influence? Or was there something else at play? There was every chance the Web wouldn’t need to sabotage her, if she fell to her own weakness first.

She needed more information, information she couldn’t get from the half-memories Jon had shoved into her head, information she couldn’t risk chasing down Annabelle Cane for. There was really only one place she could think to go.

The book she had taken from Molina would prove she was genuine, or at least interesting enough to investigate. Daisy agonized over what kind of note to include with the package- she couldn’t include too much information, not in something she was planning to put practically under Bouchard’s nose, but it had to be enough to be attention-grabbing. She knew exactly what she would need to write to lure Jon to a meeting, but she couldn’t count on his predecessor having the same suicidal curiosity. Gertrude had managed decades as Archivist and come out in far better shape than Jon managed in a handful of years; she could only assume that meant she was canny enough to suspect what would be a fairly obvious trap. 

She sent the package off with a pit in her stomach and the absurd wonder if the Postal Service had their own version of Section 31, as she assumed at least a few of the larger hospitals must. Surely Breekon and Hope couldn’t handle every piece of supernatural mail? She felt a pang of longing for a life in which she could devote her energies to answering that question. It was the kind of thing she’d normally find boring, irrelevant, but she suspected Jon would have found it fascinating. She missed him. Even with Basira occupying the same building nearly every day, she missed her as well. Basira,  _ her  _ Basira, who’d spent months jetting around the world trying to find a way to get Daisy out of the coffin and had charmed suspects and witnesses with ease, would know what to say. Alone, Daisy could only debate to herself what she could afford to give away, what she needed to know, and what she could do if Gertrude never arrived at the meeting at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comment, kudos, or find me on tumblr @inklingofadream if you enjoyed!


	8. Gertrude, 26 September 2011

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> technically haven't hit my chapter count for an extra chapter... but I do have the word count so I'm counting it

“Archivist-

“Meet in tunnels 5:30 PM 26/9/2011 to discuss Web interference with Archives/Rituals”

Gertrude had burned the note days ago, after ascertaining that there was nothing about the typed message she could use to identify its source, along with disposing of the accompanying Leitner, but the contents had been eating at her. The desk that had once belonged to Emma Harvey seemed to loom from its place gathering dust in the archive bullpen. What might Emma have left behind? Dusty and disorganized though she had made them, she had been sure she had been doing an adequate job keeping the stacks clear of cobwebs. 

She dismissed the thought that the note and meeting themselves might be some machination of the Spider. Chasing herself in circles could only distract her from whatever the Mother’s end goal might be. 

Why the tunnels? As little as she liked the man’s presence, Leitner had no reason to contact her via the mail when he could simply slip a note up through the trapdoor, nor would he need to send one of his books along. The only answer she could come up with was the dulling her connection to the Eye seemed to undergo whenever she ventured inside them, dampened until it barely seemed to be there at all. Did her mysterious contact hope to weaken her with their choice of venue, or were they afraid of being observed?

Running over what information she had, all she could truly surmise was that they somehow knew about the tunnels, the Entities, and were able to prove themselves with access to at least one Leitner. She would have to be careful of reading anything they gave her, just in case. 

They hadn’t mentioned where, exactly, they would be meeting within the tunnels, she realized as she heaved herself down through the trapdoor. It was entirely possible that they overestimated their knowledge of the labyrinthine network and would get lost or devoured on their way in, and she would never see them at all.

Gertrude paced the area nearest the trapdoor, searching for any sign of another party, and was brought up short by a large arrow chalked onto the wall. Leitner did everything he could to leave no evidence of his presence, and knew the tunnels well enough by now that he wouldn’t need such direction anyway, and Gertrude herself certainly hadn’t put it there. That left the person she was supposed to be meeting. With an unhappy twist to her mouth, she followed the arrow.

There was another not far from the turn, equally large and eye-catching, and another not far from that. She thought she had seen the door at the end of the serpentine trail, with an arrow now pointing to it from either side of the frame, during her previous investigations of the tunnels. The wood appeared clean of paint and it was slightly ajar, but she knocked nevertheless.

A husky sigh sounded from within, followed by footsteps. The door swung open, revealing a tall, well-muscled woman with blonde hair cut into a blunt bob. Her clothes were plain, and rumpled in a way that indicated they might have been changed in a hurry. A hunter like Dekker, if not a Hunter in full, unless she missed her guess.

“Gertrude Robinson, I presume?”

She took a measured step into the room, slipping a bit of putty behind her back to ensure the door would not close completely. “It seems you have me at a disadvantage.”

The woman snorted. She had placed an electric lantern in the center of the small space, and paced around it to sit against the wall so that both would be visible by its light. “...You can call me Alice.” 

“Something tells me that isn’t really your name.” Gertrude said archly.

_ Alice _ snorted. “It is  _ a  _ name.” Her lips twitched as though at some private joke before her expression went solemn. 

“Hm.” Gertrude elected to remain standing and keep hold of her lit torch. “What is it that you know about the Web and the archives?” 

She didn’t bother to put any compulsion behind the question- no need to risk a hostile start. Alice huffed a little, clearly surprised at its absence. She had come with some idea of what to expect, then.

“I think it’s trying to arrange a successful Ritual. Not its own, necessarily, just a success. Dunno why. You know Annabelle Cane?”

The name pinged something in the back of her mind, but it took a moment to recall where she had heard it. “I believe we had a statement involving an Annabelle Cane several months ago, though I can’t say I know her personally. She was a university student, correct?”

“Student turned avatar with a head full of spiders, yeah.” Gertrude waited for her to continue, but Alice simply stared as though she were a particularly puzzling piece of abstract art, eyes trying to search out meaning in the curve of her shoulders or the angle of her chin.

“You believe she’s involved in this attempt at a Ritual, as are the archives,” she prompted. If Alice was right, it was troubling news; she had felt rather secure in the assumption that the Web would not be attempting a Ritual, and would intervene if it seemed any other Power was coming too close, as it had with her and Agnes. Not an ally, but an element that could be counted on to act with goals parallel to her own. 

Alice’s face tightened. “I’ll tell you, but I want something in exchange. Information for information.”

Gertrude raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure you could be better served by a library. Or a search engine.”

Alice glared. “Not for this. You’ve been dealing with this stuff since what, the 60s? You know as much as anyone about how it works. How it changes you.”

“I suppose.”

“I need to know how you’ve been Archivist for as long as you have without properly  _ becoming _ the Archivist, without it consuming you. You’re barely dependent on the statements; you’re practically still human. How.” The capital in “Archivist” was practically audible. Interesting.

Gertrude’s gaze sharpened. “Who’s to say I am not already as… Archivist… as it is possible to be?” She still kept the Compulsion back, though it was more difficult. She hadn’t thought anyone but Emma, and presumably Elias, had known about the statements, and she saw no reason that suffering the equivalent of a nasty cold if she delayed a proper recording for too long shouldn’t be considered plenty dependent. 

Alice snorted in derision. “You aren’t, and you know you aren’t. It’s on purpose, isn’t it? I want to know how. I know there are others in contact with the Entities who’ve managed to keep from being bound to one or the other, but I figured the likes of Mary Keay would be less receptive to my questions.”

“The simplest way to avoid ‘being bound’ is to avoid contact with them altogether. What is Annabelle Cane involved with?”

Alice’s face spasmed. “Too late for that. How are you an avatar and still yourself?”

“What is Annabelle Can involved with?”

A huff of frustration. “I think she’s manipulating events to ensure a successful Ritual happens.” Vague. She felt nearly certain Alice did know something concrete, but she wasn’t sharing all or even most of it. 

Gertrude ran a hand through her hair and adopted the slightly absent look that tended to work on even those who knew her reputation, reaching into the bag of supplies she’d slung over her shoulder as she left the archives. “Do you mind if I record this, actually? Before we get into any more details.”

The other woman’s gaze sharpened. “Kind of assumed you already were.” Her eyes remained fixed on Gertrude’s hands as she pulled a recorder and a fresh tape from the bag. 

“Do you think I record all my conversations?”

Alice shrugged, but the tension remained in her spine. “The ones that happen in the freaky tunnels under your workplace, at least.” She kept staring at the recorder. “Don’t let your boss get his hands on it.” 

She didn’t look especially happy about being recorded, but Gertrude wasn’t in the habit of being overly accommodating. She inserted the tape and pressed the record button with a click.

“Repeating myself, just for the record,  **why have you come here and what do you know about the Web?”**

Alice’s face twisted as the compulsion took her, but it was already too late for her to do anything but answer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time on ttab... statement time


	9. Case #0112609

Statement of “Alice,” recorded 26 September 2011, regarding her interest in the archives and involvement with the Web

_ I don’t actually remember when things went wrong. I was already too deep in the Hunt. I remember the fight, before, wanting to protect B- my partner and my Archivist, and then the chase, but if the chase changed at any point I wasn’t aware of it.  _

_ It was a good hunt. It didn’t take long to forget why I was chasing other Hunters- I just knew I hated them, and they hated me just as much. It wasn’t too long before they split, hoping one of them could get the drop on me. Stupid. If they were Hunters once, they were prey now.  _ My  _ prey.  _

_ Killing the woman was disappointing, in the end. I’d denied the Hunt for a  _ long  _ time, and if the Entities feel anything, it was glad to have me back. Her flesh was no match for my claws and teeth. I could’ve waited there to ambush the old man, but it would’ve been boring. He left the tunnels, after he found her, and I followed, close enough he knew he was being chased but never so close he could see me for certain.  _

_ I gave him just a bit too much of a lead. The next time I came into sight of him, he was dead. I didn’t even get to see it end- I was furious. I thought the person kneeling next to him might make a more interesting chase than it seemed; even in that state I could feel the power coming off of them, but even aside from that everything about them  _ screamed _ prey. I didn’t understand how this pathetic frightened creature could have stolen my kill.  _

__ _ I assumed they were too frightened to run, but they were so terrified I hardly cared. When I pounced, took them to the ground, they just Looked at me with those awful eyes, and I decided I would start by clawing them out. But they kept Looking, and I had no choice but to look with them, past the beast and the blood to the person underneath, and then past that to the woman I’d been in the coffin, cut off from the Hunt. My Archivist pulled me out then, and they pulled me out again this time, back into myself, back into control.  _

__ _ Coming back to myself, I had a moment of doubled awareness- on the one hand, the part of me that delighted in making my prey so afraid tears were running down their cheeks, and on the other the part that had been so careful to build our relationship so that I could trust them and be trusted in return. I’d attacked a member of my pack. _

__ _ The Archivist called the others- they’d been hiding not far off, because the self-sacrificing idiot had insisted they could save me from myself, but only if they did it alone. I realized they’d watched me attack, that they knew what I’d almost done.  _ [Strained] _ The Archivist and I met because I was hunting them; I nearly killed them before it was over, and if they weren’t the Archivist I think they would have had nightmares about me standing over them in the forest, making them dig their own grave. The others knew that, knew what a monster I was, and I felt like everyone in the world knew as well. All the worst parts of myself on display. _

__ _ My partner offered me a hand, and when I reached up to take it- even as I could hardly believe she’d still allow a monster like me to touch her- I looked past her, at the sky. And the sky Looked back. . _

__ _ They were all happy to have me back, and the feeling faded with time. And even if they had all hated me for the monster, we didn’t exactly have our choice of allies.  _

_ Eventually, I found out the Archivist hadn’t killed the old man at all, though they knew my assumptions would make them good bait. My partner had shot him before I arrived. By that point if the Archivist killed something there wasn’t usually much left _

__ _ I won’t tell you how the Ritual worked. I can’t risk anyone else finding out how to remake the world like that. Jonah Magnus realized what was needed when you didn’t even try to stop the Extinguished Sun and it failed regardless. I’m sure if you try you can extrapolate most of it from its effects: every Entity made manifest, with the Eye above it all and the Institute and the Panopticon drawn up to tower over everything and Watch. Don’t try. _

__ _ They didn’t want to, but the Archivist was the one who actually performed the Ritual. The Entities knew it, as much as they know anything, and I think they were grateful. It gave the Archivist some leeway. Not enough to save any significant number of people, but enough to keep the handful of us they considered friends safer than anyone else was, in that world. Not  _ actually  _ safe, but close enough. M- one of the others called them ‘the Entities’ eldritch sugar baby,’  _ [laughs] _ and she wasn’t  _ wrong _.  _

__ _ I’m sure if we’d made it to the tower we would have found Magnus gloating over it all, pleased with the remade world, but my Archivist hated it. They’d always blamed themself for things they had nothing to do with, but being the one to actually perform the Ritual… _

__ _ I think that might have been part of why they were able to find the artifact that brought me back. One of the Powers decided it couldn’t stand the Archivist’s moping anymore. That and boredom. There are only so many iterations of terror possible in a world that’s practically unchanging, and even though the Eye was still satisfied, it’s not the only Power out there, and they all had their claws in my Archivist. That bit’s only a theory, though. Maybe the Change made the Archivist so powerful they were able to manifest a way out from just wanting it enough.  _

__ _ I don’t know if it even exists in this world, or where it came from, or how it worked, but it  _ did  _ work. And now that I’m here, I’ve got to fix things. Prevent the Ritual, but prevent my partner and my Archivist from suffering, too. I thought maybe your memory had been exaggerated, but you seem confident enough- cautious, but not especially fearful. My Archivist was  _ always  _ afraid, and so  _ tired, _ and it only got worse the longer I knew them. Part of that was my fault, but now I’m going to  _ keep  _ it from happening. To them and anyone else I can get my hands on. Even if I never get to see them again, it seems like a fair price for a chance at making a world they’d be proud of.  _

__ _ I told myself that I’d do that even if it meant never knowing them again- them or my partner, after I realized how far back I’d come. And I tried to hold myself to that. But my partner was Sectio- But the Web made sure my partner encountered something terrible anyway, and I don’t know why, or how they knew to do it. I don’t know enough about the players, and I’m afraid of losing myself to the Hunt again. Annabelle Cane just showed up out of nowhere, and I don’t know her endgame or why she’s doing what she’s done. I thought maybe I wouldn’t be able to make any changes at all, that something would always undo them and push events back toward what they were. That I’d been sent back just to watch it all unravel all over again. But everything else so far has stayed changed; the only thing that hasn’t is my partner. So it has to be deliberate, targetted. But I don’t know  _ why _. _

_ I’d like to hunt Annabelle down and make her tell me, but I know I shouldn’t. I  _ can’t _. Not without losing myself. You were the Archivist- you’ve  _ been  _ the Archivist- for decades, but somehow you’re  _ less _ the Archivist than my Archivist was after barely three years. And you spent that whole time stopping Rituals. If anyone could help…  _ [sighs]

_ I hadn’t meant to tell you so much.  _ [Growls]  _ There’s too much of a risk of Magnus pulling it out of you and accelerating his plans, or  _ out of my dreams _ since you’ve made it a proper  _ Statement _ , but apparently knowing when to stop asking questions isn’t a power granted to  _ any  _ Archivist. Next time you can’t stand not Knowing, just ask me to write it out. Statement  _ fucking  _ ends. _

-

Final Comments: “Alice” refused to say any more on tape, and left shortly after completing her statement, although I believe she’ll be back. As for the statement itself…

Alice herself certainly believes it to be the truth, and it doesn’t show the kind of confusion I would expect from the Spiral. She seemed quite certain the Web was involved but I can’t see the benefit to them of sending her to me. The lack of names  _ could  _ be an indication of the Stranger, but I believe she started to say a name and stopped herself more than once- deliberate obfuscation seems more probable.  _ If  _ she’s telling the truth, and in some...  _ alternate future,  _ I suppose.. If she spent significant amounts of time in a world where the Entities had fully manifested, alongside an Archivist whose powers were realized to the point they were capable of conducting such a Ritual, then I suppose it’s not out of the realm of possibility that she’s cultivated some resistance to compulsion, and focused that on hiding the names of her compatriots. And was she deliberately concealing this hypothetical Archivist’s gender, or were they too far gone for such notions to apply? Hm. 

The coffin could be the same as the one we lost Fiona to. I believe it’s still in the custody of Breekon and Hope. If it is the same coffin, its verifiable existence could be a point in favor of the statement’s veracity, as well as her knowledge of the effects of giving a live statement. She knew a fair bit more than I’d expect. I haven’t heard anything about a Hunter matching her description, so she can’t have been at it too long, at least not as actively as she clearly is now. An old man touched by the Hunt sounds familiar as well... 

Assuming the statement is true, it confirms my conviction that prevention is the only cure for a successful Ritual. It would seem that I didn’t live to see it. I don’t know if that’s a comfort. She may not have revealed the full Ritual, but I believe she told more than she thinks. The implication would seem to be that the Rituals would have failed even without my involvement. I’d started to suspect as much, watching the Spiral’s Ritual collapse, but it's good to have the confirmation. It’s a bit of a comfort, I suppose, though I doubt it would seem so to Jan Kilbride. And if she’d been half a year earlier I wouldn’t have bothered sending Michael into the Distortion. A shame.

She mentions Jonah Magnus, but not Elias or any other person associated with the Institute. There’s a theory I’ve been toying with in recent years… it hasn’t seemed especially likely, but I believe this is as good a sign as any to begin investigating further. 

Aside from that, there isn’t much I can do until Alice makes contact again. She was quite angry when she left, but I think she’ll be back regardless. She gave no indication of where she works or lives, or her real name. I’ll try to find her an answer about keeping away from the Hunt, and take extra precautions against any potential assailants. I assume Elias would not appoint a new Head Archivist by allowing me to  _ retire _ , even if I blinded myself. Even aside from preventing my own death, I believe I’d be doing my theoretical successor a favor. They must have been a dreadfully unlucky sort, to take up my post  _ and  _ manage to inspire that kind of possessiveness from an avatar of the Hunt. Or they were more malicious than she claims.

I’ll have to take steps to ensure this tape remains out of the hands of anyone who might make use of the information it contains. I’m reluctant to destroy it when Alice seems so tightlipped, but I may have to. For now, one of my usual hiding places should do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Daisy can have one (1) swear. For a treat.
> 
> Find me on tumblr @inklingofadream to see random trivia and process that may or may not end up in the final draft!


	10. Gertrude, 26 September-25 October 2011

There was a moment as Alice finished her statement that Gertrude thought she might actually attack her. Anger twisted her sharp features, and her fists clenched at her sides, nails digging into flesh like they wished they were claws. But after a long moment of tension, the Hunter turned on her heel and left. 

Gertrude stared after her, and when her footsteps faded she turned off the lantern (wondered if Alice would be back to reclaim it) and left the small room. On her way back toward the archives, she carefully wiped out the chalk arrows that had led her there- no need for Elias or Leitner to get curious. When she was only a few turns away from relative safety, she stopped and leaned against a wall to record her comments. Speaking her thoughts out loud ordered them a bit, and gave her the clarity to complete her precautions, hiding the tape and banishing all thoughts of the strange meeting from her mind. Elias undoubtedly noticed her excursion into the tunnels, but there was no reason for him to think that this was any different from her usual ventures.

She kept up the placid facade all the way home, not allowing herself to show any annoyance when she felt Elias’ gaze pass over her absentmindedly. Back in her flat, she was as protected as she was anywhere outside the tunnels, and could finally try to absorb the emotional reality of the statement she had just taken, in addition to the practicalities.

The End had never held any particular terror for her; all things ended, and she would as well, and all she could do about it was make the most of the time she had. Still, the implicit death Alice’s statement foretold had her a bit shaken. How long had she lasted? Another decade? Five years? Fifty, decaying into something like the thing in Alexandria? Surely Elias (Magnus?) wouldn’t wait that long, if the Archivist was so central to his Ritual. Besides, that would certainly count as giving herself over to the Eye in precisely the way Alice’s Archivist allegedly had.

The idea that she had never been necessary to prevent the Rituals in the first place stung. Her life’s work, the thing she’d killed and bled and tied herself to an avatar of Desolation for, pointless. If she had known, what would she have done differently? Would she have noticed Emma slowly succumbing to the Web, or her manipulations of the other assistants, earlier? Certainly, Jan Kilbride and Michael Shelley's sacrifices would have been rendered unnecessary. She couldn’t help but indulge in the what-ifs. She did so for far longer than she should have, reluctant to face whatever Alice’s dreams would contain. She didn’t know if she shared the hope that the future Archivist’s identity would be kept from her. Even if they regretted it afterward, surely some part of them had to  _ want  _ the Ritual to succeed to perform it in the first place. It might be better to remove an element like that before it became a problem.

-

Alice’s dream didn’t allow Gertrude a proper glimpse of either her successor or her greatest fear come to life. The world was bent and strange, yes, but in the way scenery half-remembered from a long car ride blurs together. Occasionally there was a flash of something more, something rotten and hateful providing a temporary haven for the Hunter’s prey or throwing up a bony obstacle in her path, but nothing more. The Hunter clearly feared the loss of control over her own mind and body, twisted into sharp teeth and lupine posture and pulled along by web and thread, more than the loss of the world. The unsettling human figures she tore into were nearly featureless. As Gertrude observed the tableau night after night, a pattern became clear, a pair of repetitions, one a slight and stumbling figure, another surefooted and solidly-built, the occasional flash of terrified eyes in brown or green, whose deaths made the Hunter howl in agony before being pulled to the next piece of prey. The Archivist and the partner, she assumed, but no way of knowing which was which.

It was scant evidence, but Gertrude found herself searching for similarities in posture and eye color among the Institute employees she usually ignored. If she could identify her successor she could dispose of them, encourage them to leave the Institute or take more definitive action. If she could find a more suitable candidate, maybe she could push them to the forefront of Elias’ attention instead. If he was Elias.

And that was an even more complicated issue to confront. There was a frustrating lack of material written by Magnus himself in the Institute collection; the more irritable part of Gertrude wanted to take that in itself as proof of her theory. What kind of man founds an academic institution but doesn’t entrust his personal papers to them postmortem? She had hoped to find letters or journals written by the man, to compare to Elias and her memories of James Wright, but had no luck. Material relating to Jonah Magnus was also notably absent in every study of Robert Smirke, the People’s Church of the Divine Host, and the von Closens. For all the correspondence she could turn up- not to mention the list of the Institute’s original donors- indicated the man’s social circle had been large, elite, and influential, as far as recorded history seemed to be concerned he existed for a single moment in 1818 in which he founded the Magnus Institute and then vanished back into total obscurity.

She had redirected her efforts into finding ways Jonah Magnus could still be influencing the Institute and its archivist. Alice alluded to the possibility of Magnus taking the information from Gertrude herself by force, implying she might meet him in person- another point of suspicion regarding Elias- but she couldn’t rely too much on a single piece of evidence and neglect other possibilities.

At least the timing gave her plenty of time for research- just about every statement that entered the Institute for the entire month of October (and there were more then than any other month) could be rejected as useless drivel. News of anything with the slightest bit of credibility would filter through Research and make its way to her eventually, allowing her to focus entirely on her latest investigation. She rejected all the statements about immortal avatars of the End on the basis that it was unlikely for an acolyte of the Eye to be able to pledge themself to another Power deeply enough to avoid their own end, but that still left her with a fair number of options. Maxwell Rayner, Simon Fairchild, and John Amherst were all kept alive well past a normal lifetime by their Entities, though the means differed. Fairchild still aged, which seemed like it would be noticeable; she supposed that someone brought back repeatedly like Amherst might not be noticeable if they didn’t put themselves in life-threatening situations. However, both of those would imply a continuity of appearance. If someone had been skulking around the Institute for the entirety of Gertrude’s employment and beyond, she would have noticed. Which left Rayner…. There was a compelling symmetry in the idea that Powers as opposed as Dark and Eye could grant near-immortality by the same means.

In the midst of her research, she was displeased to find herself called into a meeting with Elias. He liked to do this, nose into her business at random points outside of the scheduled monthly meetings she was obligated to attend with him as a department head. He would give a platitude about wanting to keep up to date on the happenings across the Institute, and she wouldn’t point out that he Watched nearly everything of note, and he’d try to insert himself into her research again. They were an exhausting waste of time.

“Good morning Gertrude.” Elias was as pressed and tidy as always, poised as though for a friendly chat between colleagues.

“What is it this time, Elias?” The sooner she found out the sooner this meeting would be over. She’d try compelling it out of him if she thought it had the slightest chance of working on an avatar of the Eye as powerful as Elias.

“Straight to the point as always.” He did a fairly admirable job keeping the annoyance out of his voice, but didn’t quite succeed. “I wanted to discuss the state of the Archives.” 

If it wouldn’t have disrupted the facade of a normal interaction with her employer and thereby prolonged the meeting, Gertrude would have rolled her eyes. Ever since she’d started to let the archives become increasingly disorganized in a bid to discourage the Eye and any investigators besides herself, Elias had brought her in every few months to make implications about her age and overwork. “The Archival department is operating as smoothly as ever?” She accented her question with a polite tilt of her head, as though she had no idea what he could be talking about. Was he considering her replacement even now?

“Gertrude, I know it’s been difficult, but we both know that’s not true.” Elias’ face held nothing but earnest concern, but Gertrude had known him for too long to believe it. Her stomach twisted as she realized where the conversation was going.

“I am as capable of running the archives now as I ever was.” 

“Yes, but in the past you’ve never run them  _ alone _ . I know the loss of Ms. Harvey, Ms. Carpenter, and Mr. Shelley was hard on us all-” as if he didn’t know exactly what had happened to all three, as if he hadn’t implicitly or explicitly allowed the deaths himself, “-especially in such quick succession, but as time goes by I think you should begin to consider filling their positions. I have a few candidates in mind who I believe you’d find more than adequate, if you’d like to see their files.” He tapped a slim stack of said files against the desk, aligning their edges. 

“That won’t be necessary, Elias.” She simply couldn’t afford to let anyone else so close to her investigations; she had no intention of taking on any new assistants. Before she could tell Elias as much, however, another thought occurred to her. “I’d rather not hire anyone from outside the Institute, and for an internal promotion I would rather become acquainted with their work myself.” She’d never shown interest in the rest of the Institute staff before. That was part of why she’d focused her work on Alice’s statement on the Jonah Magnus issue, rather than the Archivist; changing her behavior now would draw too much attention. But she’d never lost her entire staff of assistants practically in one stroke before, either.

“I have a few internal applicant files as well.” He split the stack and held half of it across the desk, offering it to her, but Gertrude shook her head.

“If you don’t mind, I believe I’ll conduct my own informal interviews as time permits. I can learn much more from that than any file.”

Elias pursed his lips. “That could take some time, considering how busy you are as it is. Which is all the more reason to find at least one new assistant immediately.”

“If it takes some time, it seems only appropriate that the positions should remain empty for a while, out of respect. We would hate to seem as though we’ve forgotten such a tragedy so quickly, wouldn’t we?” she said sharply.  _ We would hate to give anyone reason to suspect the Institute was involved in anything more than the dull work of academia.  _ She had won, and she could tell from the look in his eyes that Elias knew it. There would be a few more rounds of hemming and hawing, but Gertrude would have her way in the end.


	11. Daisy, October 2011

Daisy wasn’t used to putting so much thought into her every action. She found a monster, she hunted it down, she disposed of the evidence, and in between she talked with Basira and listened to the Archers and did paperwork. Even after ending up in the Archives, she’d let the others handle the planning; they were better at it. Daisy was good for company and being pointed at a target and not much else.

But now everything she did could end the world. It hadn’t even occurred to her until after she’d sent off the package to Gertrude that the Web wasn’t actually interfering with the Archives- or at least not  _ Gertrude’s  _ Archives. She’d assumed she could cover the mistake, maybe even give herself a bit of an advantage, by acting like all  _ she  _ cared about was resisting the Hunt, and the information on the Web was just something to offer in trade. 

What else had she given away? She didn’t think she’d been subtle in her surprise that Gertrude wasn’t recording the conversation from the start, and that she actually had to set up a tape for it to be recorded; Daisy was too used to the small fleet of recorders that hummed around Jon whenever anything remotely noteworthy happened, whether he wanted them there or not. 

The only thing she’d actually given proper consideration to, looking back, was keeping Jon’s identity from Gertrude. Even if he wasn’t Archivist yet, even if she gave Gertrude all the information to keep Bouchard from killing her in the first place, Daisy wasn’t at all confident that Gertrude wouldn’t decide the world was safer without Jonathan Sims in it. The thought struck her with a sickening mixture of terror and disgust for the time when she’d held the same opinion. 

She’d forgotten how much she hated giving a Statement, as well. It had been ages, since Jon had unintentionally pulled the story of her Sectioning from her. With intentional compulsion behind it, it was worse, closer to the feeling of listening to Bouchard narrate the Statement she never gave. Something about the Archivist’s influence pulled things out of her even if they weren’t strictly relevant to the Statement itself, made her verbalize things she didn’t want to face. How much of her was the Hunt’s, to call her friends her pack, like an animal (like a predator)? And once again, there was nothing protecting her from the dreams.

They were almost a welcome reprieve, a break from the worst case scenarios her psyche seemed to love devising, where she watched Basira and Jon and sometimes the others die over and over again in assorted gruesome ways, all her efforts to prevent it futile. Gertrude stood watching her run through the ruined world, pulled through the chase by silken strings that never allowed her to turn her ire on the staring Archivist. The horror and revulsion of knowing she had given in to the Hunt and the creeping paranoia of knowing her actions were directed to ruin by an unseen puppetmaster were there,and the moment of realization that the insignificant prey between her teeth was staring up with Jon or Basira’s eyes, but their faces stayed obscured. Her sleeping mind wouldn’t give up her friends’ identities, and there was something to be said for predictability.

The same paranoia that plagued her nights froze her heart in her chest every time she tried to talk to Basira. If the other woman had to be Sectioned alongside her, even if they couldn’t rebuild the easy camaraderie from her first life, Daisy thought the scant smiles and friendly small talk of a work acquaintanceship was a small thing to ask. Or it would be, if it didn’t risk pulling Basira even further into the quagmire of the Entities and the apocalypse. The genuine smiles she’d been so determined to protect already seemed scarcer.

Basira had backed off after her initial friendly overture, offput by Daisy’s inability to make it through a full conversation with her and the rumors that never took long to reach new Sectioned officers. You didn’t go out with Tonner unless you wanted to risk another Section 31, she got more of them than almost anyone else, especially since she was one of the only Sectioned detectives. She couldn’t blame Basira for wanting to avoid that, after whatever happened to her old partner. She didn’t remember the other woman being so torn up about his death last time, but then Basira wasn’t actually there when he died the first time. Every time Daisy thought about trying to comfort her, to get closer to her, it felt like phantom threads were pulling them together. She didn’t know if it was real or paranoia. She couldn’t risk it being real, not with  _ Basira _ .

Well into October, Daisy remained unsure that the anger had dissipated enough that she could speak with Gertrude without attacking her. She hadn’t planned on meeting with her this often; if their first meeting had gone the way Daisy wanted it to they might never have met again. Every time she spoke with Gertrude was another chance for Gertrude to find out who she was outside of their meetings was another chance for Bouchard to hear her name and decide to take an interest. The best protection she had was keeping him unaware of her existence; using her own infrequently-used given name as a pseudonym wasn’t the best deception, and it galled her to hear it instead of her chosen name, but she doubted a more blatant lie would have passed without investigation. If she kept up her other precautions, she’d probably be fine. There had to be lots of people named Alice in London.

She contemplated her next venture to the tunnels and didn’t allow herself to acknowledge how much of her plan relied on luck.

-

She’d started spending more and more time at the gym. If she was going to spend so much time thinking, she may as well do it on a treadmill or a rowing machine.

Being so lost in thought was probably why it took her so long to notice that the treadmill next to hers was in use, but its occupant wasn’t running. Daisy felt a chill run down her spine.

“What do you want?”

“Is that how you greet all your friends? No wonder you don’t have many.” Annabelle Cane was perched improbably on the handles of the treadmill, as relaxed as if it were an armchair.

“Have you been watching me?” Even if she couldn’t prevent Annabelle from manipulating the people around her, she thought she’d prevented that at least. She’d been so careful clearing her car, and checking all the corners of her apartment regularly. What had she missed?

Annabelle shrugged, staring off sideways into nothing so that Daisy had a full view of the caved-in part of her skull. It looked more rounded than it had during their last encounter, but there was still an obvious dent that spiders scaled like a craggy cliff face. “I’d hate for you to get too Lonely, is all.” 

“And my social life is your business why?”

Annabelle grinned. “I told you last time, I think we should be friends. Meet me out front.” She leaped from the treadmill and vanished out the door faster than seemed possible.

Daisy didn’t think Annabelle would make her come if she ignored her- or at least she wouldn’t until Daisy herself made the decision to do so. She felt as though she could continue her run until the end of her usual workout, or longer, if she wanted, though it did finally occur to her that it was odd she hadn’t thought to stop running when Annabelle had appeared. 

She needed to know what Annabelle knew. She couldn’t find Annabelle and interrogate her of her own volition without encouraging the Hunt. The choice was simple.

If Annabelle was bothered by Daisy emerging from the gym still in her sweaty workout clothes, she didn’t show it, just wrapped her arm through Daisy’s and started to stroll off for destinations unknown. Daisy bit back the urge to jerk the limb violently away and allowed herself to be led.

“How’s work been, Detective Tonner? Or can I call you Daisy?” Daisy grit her teeth at the name. Of course if Annabelle knew enough to find her, to manipulate the people around her, she would have found out her name as well. Annabelle’s mien was no different than if they were two friends on an outing.

“How’s being a spider monster?” It didn’t occur to her until the words were already out that it might not be best to start off so antagonistically. She was too used to extracting her answers with pain and threats, she wasn’t meant for this kind of faux-friendly conversation.

Annabelle laughed cheerily. “Oh, same as it always is. Any interesting coworkers?”

Daisy bristled, but did her best to keep her tone as similar to Annabelle’s as she could. She needed to know how much she knew. “B- Our newest Sectioned officer had her own run-in with some kind of spider monster. Know anything about it?” Her heart sped up as she nearly let Basira’s name slip; if there was any chance Annabelle didn’t know it she couldn’t hand it over to her.

Annabelle pressed her hand to her mouth in a theatrical expression of dismay and swung Daisy in a broad turn into a small cafe. “I hope the poor thing’s alright! I can’t imagine you get new blood very often.” She pulled Daisy straight to the counter, bypassing the queue entirely- none of the other customers complained, their eyes all slightly glassy- and chirped her order to the cashier. Then she turned to Daisy. “What do you want?” She bumped their shoulders together, still overly friendly. “My treat!”

Daisy stuttered out the first menu item her eyes landed on and allowed herself to be led to a table with a nice view out of the front windows and onto the street beyond. When they had their food- Daisy had ended up with tea, tomato soup, and a grilled cheese sandwich, while Annabelle had a coffee and some sort of sandwich of her own- Annabelle picked the conversation back up. “What’s she like?”

Daisy blinked. “Who?”

“Your new coworker!” Annabelle looked at her as if she were slow. “And eat, don’t let it get cold!” The avatar brought her own coffee to her lips, but didn’t sip.

Daisy took a bite of sandwich to stall for time. Had Annabelle really sought her out just to gloat? “...I’m more interested in why Bas- why she got Sectioned at all. Sectioned cases aren’t common, and that was one of a couple clustered together. Why do you care?” 

Annabelle smiled broadly and waved a hand dismissively. “Just friendly curiosity.” 

Daisy put in before the other woman could continue. “I know you’ve been spying on me; don’t insult me by pretending you haven’t.”

Annabelle gave her a stern look. “I just think you could use more friends, and you and  _ Basira _ seemed to hit it off quite nicely when you first met. You work so hard- it’d be good for you to share the load with a friend. Or something more.” Her eyes glittered.

It was becoming more and more difficult to keep her temper under control, blood pounding in her ears. “Leave Basira alone. She’s got nothing to do with this.”

Annabelle put her hands up placatingly and nodded. “...You’re just awful protective of her for a regular colleague.” 

Before Daisy could do something stupid like leap across the table and attack her- was that a threat, did Annabelle know they were partners in the old timeline, did she have some vested interest in making sure they were again?- Annabelle changed the subject. “How’s the Archivist?”

For a long moment, already on edge from the implications about Basira, Daisy thought she was referring, somehow, to Jon. Daisy hadn’t seen him, had no way of knowing how he was, had Annabelle  _ done  _ something to him?

“I mean, you can’t think I wouldn’t notice you meeting up with her,” Annabelle continued after Daisy’s panicked silence dragged on a bit too long. 

Gertrude. She’d been to see Gertrude. Because of Annabelle. Of course the Web avatar would take an interest. “Don’t you already know?”

Annabelle rolled her eyes. “I can’t watch  _ everything _ , you’re confusing me with the Archivist, or the Head of her Institute. And besides, I’m sure you  _ know  _ the kind of things the tunnels can do.” 

So Annabelle most likely didn’t know the contents of her Statement. She still had that scrap of privacy (and she crushed the part of her that felt like even that much privacy was a luxury, after living in the world of the Ceaseless Watcher).

“She seemed fine. Asked too many questions. I’m sure that’s pretty typical for her.” If Annabelle wasn’t going to acknowledge Daisy’s knowledge of another Archivist, Daisy wasn’t going to do it for her. 

“Hmm. She doesn’t like my lot much. I’d hate for our friendship to be ruined before it’s begun because she gave you a bad impression of me,” Annabelle pouted. 

Daisy rubbed her temples. “Is there a point to this conversation?” 

Annabelle shrugged. “I still think you should make a move on Basira! It’s not as though your crush on her isn’t obvious! But if you’re  _ so  _ bored with me I’ll go!” She didn’t seem entirely pleased, but she did stand up. Daisy didn’t stop her- she was more likely to do something regrettable than get more information from Annabelle today. She didn’t have  _ time  _ to stop her when Annabelle leaned into her personal space and gave her a brief half hug. It felt like more than one arm was involved, although only one was visibly wrapped around her. Annabelle waved over her shoulder as she exited the cafe. “See you soon!”

Daisy sat, absently picking at her food. Then she ate Annabelle's as well- after all, it was untouched, and she needed to replace the calories from her workout, and if she was ever inclined to waste food that had been well trained out of her by the apocalypse. It was dark by the time she finished, but she walked home, thoughts spinning, baffled by the interaction. What on  _ earth _ did Annabelle  _ want _ ?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear Annabelle is never scheduled in my outline. I didn't think Daisy'd be seeing her until early 2012, 5+ chapters from now, but Here She Is.


	12. Annabelle, Agust-November 2011

It was tremendously disappointing to see Detective Tonner ignore her advice entirely, though not wholly surprising that their conversation had triggered another meeting with the Archivist. Annabelle wished she could follow, but the Mother was reluctant to allow her into the tunnels below Millbank Prison and the Magnus Institute. Too many unpredictable elements, and Annabelle, in the Mother’s eye, was too new. She’d been an avatar for a  _ full  _ year now, but objecting felt too childish.

Based on her reaction, Daisy didn’t find her conversation with the Archivist as illuminating as she’d hoped. Naturally; Annabelle hadn’t even taken note of the woman until Daisy started meeting with her; none of the Mother’s plans required either Institute or Archivist for some time yet, and until recently another of her children had ensured the Web could step in quickly if it became necessary. 

Maybe it was the anniversary of the doomed arachnophobia study- her second birthday, the day she’d been truly born into power and knowledge- making her nostalgic. She didn’t miss her family, where she’d been overlooked and crowded out, but the knowledge that another child of the Mother had been enmeshed even peripherally in what was rapidly becoming Annabelle’s favorite entertainment lit a pang of jealousy in her. Accompanied by vindictive pleasure at the death of the sister she’d never met.

She hadn’t meant to become so absorbed in Daisy Tonner’s life, just set a couple of tiny spies to spin in the corners of her life unnoticed until she became relevant. She’d intended to check in just after their first meeting and ascertain the Hunter’s name, then push her aside as irrelevant until the Mother drew her back. But other business had kept her attention away longer than she’d meant and when she’d finally looked, she’d been greeted with the delightful sight of the Hunter trying to suppress the beast long enough to make it through a stuttering conversation with another officer.

Annabelle’s attention had been drawn immediately to the thread that failed to connect the two women. It was thick and strong, wrapped tight around Daisy’s heart, the kind of tie she’d become used to seeing bonding only the closest relationships. Defying all her expectations and experience, however, the other end drifted aimlessly in the hijabi woman’s direction, like the faintest line of silk stirred by a breeze, never connecting. Even when they parted, the line remained, floating after its target and flaring in and out of focus. The times when it cleared and solidified enough that she could see it without straining seemed to correlate with the Hunter plunging into bouts of melancholy and wistfulness. Annabelle could almost understand the appeal of Beholding as she itched to find the cause behind the mystery.

She glanced in every so often, turning the puzzle over and over, sending spiders to spy on as much of Daisy’s life as possible. The Mother had no answers for her; either the detective was wholly unique or this was something Annabelle was meant to learn for herself. Even without the mystery, her occasional insights into the Hunter’s life were entertaining enough. The other avatar seemed at once desperate to cling to every possible scrap of conventional humanity, jolting and balking at the gleaming strand leashing her to her patron, and absurdly suited to the Hunt. As much as she resisted allowing herself a proper chase, her eyes gleamed with satisfaction every time her target was caught. And she caught them with such ease, in such quantity. That minor bafflement had needled at Annabelle as well, until she noticed the threads that sparkled to prominence, winding around her upper arms to settle in the shape of an Eye at the hollow of her throat, nearly obscured by the Hunt’s collar. 

That, at least, was less of a mystery to Annabelle. She’d seen ties like that before, connected to nothing but stitched into the bearers very being, on others. Those who could gain power, if they made the choice, victims only half consumed, people marked by an especially powerful or insidious artifact. It seemed probable that Daisy had had an encounter with the latter, at some point in her long career. She wondered if the detective even knew it was there, lending the occasional helping hand to her Hunts. She wondered what the price of that help was.

She’d almost convinced herself that the object of the thread around the Hunter’s heart- PC Basira Hussain, new to the police and with little to connect her to Daisy- was irrelevant, incidental to a connection with an origin similar to the Eye mark, when one of her little messengers brought her a clue. From a nearly imperceptible crack in the corner of the Hunter’s bedroom, a spider had been able to peer out and watch her toss and turn nearly every night, until one night she jerked out of her dreams with a cry of “ _ Basira _ !” Daisy had sat up in bed, clutching her hands to her heart and quietly crying, for a long time afterward, rocking back and forth and muttering “I’m sorry, I love you, come back, I’m sorry” until she had fallen back asleep, the web shuddering along with her the entire time.

After that, things clicked into place for Annabelle. She dismissed the guilt-laden tone, her spying sibling assuring her that it accompanied nearly every nightmare grim enough to wake Daisy, and focused on the words. It made sense that Daisy might know about the other officer without that knowledge being reciprocal; Annabelle was sure police must have all sorts of internet groups and social events, and PC Hussain might have caught Daisy’s attention in any of those contexts, and after that it would hardly be difficult to have kept tabs on her digitally. Combine all that with the stuttering and blushing when they’d spoken and Annabelle realized with delight just what had given the thread around her heart such strength with no anchor on the other side. Daisy had, unbeknownst to Basira herself, been quietly pining for the woman for who-knew-how-long.

Her next steps were immediately clear, and the Mother had no objection. After all, hadn’t Annabelle wanted to get into Daisy’s good graces as a potential ally? What better way to endear herself than to tidily arrange things so that the Hunter’s work crush was brought into her proximity every day. She even made sure to dispose of Basira’s current partner, so that Daisy herself could volunteer for that role if she felt particularly daring. And now, whenever Annabelle’s attention wasn’t required elsewhere, she could look in on the plotline of her very own private soap opera. 

She likely should have anticipated that, with her desperation to remain human, Daisy wouldn’t properly appreciate the gift, simply because she disapproved of Annabelle’s methods. To her own embarrassment, Annabelle hadn’t realized  _ why _ the Hunter was so upset until they talked in person. She’d been certain all she’d need to make a move was a pep talk from a girl friend! And if they weren’t technically that close yet, well. It wasn’t as though Daisy had any other girl friends Annabelle could encourage to have the conversation in her place. Trust the Hunt to take everything as an attack.

Still, whatever she’d discussed with the Archivist did nothing to direct Daisy’s attention back to what was important (i.e. blushing her way through conversations with Basira for Annabelle’s entertainment). She still edged around the other woman as though contact would transmit some fatal disease, the usual avoidance now tinged with frustration at her apparent lack of progress on whatever project she was working on with the Archivist (even if she motivated some of their meetings, Annabelle wasn’t vain enough to suppose she was the only topic of conversation). 

For the first time, Annabelle obeyed the Mother’s urging with reluctance, when she was pulled away from this personal project. She was sure the odds and ends she pushed into place were in service of  _ some  _ great design, but Annabelle couldn’t see it. The specter of immaturity needled at her again, memories of being pulled away from her own occupations to clean her room overlaying her current pastimes. The Mother needed her more than her own parents ever had, she reminded herself. Any of her siblings could have done the chores, but she was the only full avatar of the Web in the country. Even if they wouldn’t come to fruition for years yet, big things were coming, and many of them centered on London.  _ Annabelle _ was the essential piece in ensuring all went well. Of course she shouldn’t be wasting her time with matchmaking, or finding clothes she preferred, or anything else. She had important work to do.

She still peered in on Daisy from time to time, especially when one of her spies said something interesting was happening. Even if the Mother didn’t see it, she was sure that getting into the Hunter’s good graces would pay off in the long run, and one couldn’t accomplish great works without occasionally blowing off a little steam. Besides, every tiny thread Annabelle pulled sent the detective into a spiral of worry for weeks afterward over how much of her actions and circumstances were manipulated, creating a veritable buffet for the Web. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm taking prompts on tumblr @inklingofadream because i desperately don't wanna think about politics... hmu


	13. Gerard, 22-27 December 2011

It wasn’t as though he and his mum had ever really celebrated Christmas, but Gerard still felt it was unfair that the Lightless Flame would decide to make a nuisance of itself and put him in hospital over the holidays. He hadn’t even gotten to destroy the Leitner Diego Molina was supposed to have had for his trouble; when he’d tracked a series of small fires to Molina, the man was raving about having lost it, clearly spiralling out of control. That had been the pattern for the Flame, in the years since Agnes’ death. Desolation was never especially controlled to begin with, and without their messiah to give them a purpose, the Cult had fractured. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the loss had been a great enough blow to cause some to succumb to their own god.

Regardless, in the hazy moments of semi-clarity he gained, never quite truly conscious but always Watching, Gerard was mired in frustration. No book, and he’d lost his pendant. Beholding wouldn’t be granting him another narrow escape like this one without the artifact to ground it, not without taking more than he was willing to give. He didn’t have especially high hopes of finding another artefact of the Eye that could serve the same purpose. And the pendant had matched his aesthetic.

At first, when he noticed his mother trotting into his hospital room, he thought he was hallucinating. Mary almost never left Pinhole Books these days, and then it was almost always in pursuit of a new Leitner. He hadn’t expected her to turn up looking for him. When he was a child, the action would have made him glow with happiness, taken it as a sign his mum really did care about him as much as her books. He knew better, now.

Filing his discharge was a lengthy process, given that as far as the doctors were concerned he was still unconscious. Mary sat next to his bed, looming like a gargoyle, for its entirety. He wondered if she knew he was aware, and wanted to prevent him finding some way to slip her grasp for a few more days, or if she was just enjoying the obvious discomfort of the hospital staff, all clearly unnerved by her appearance and affect but unwilling to offend a mother whose son had been so badly injured, and at Christmas. Whatever his mum said about avoiding tying herself to any one Power, she’d always fed off fear as much as any avatar.

When enough of the drugs had been flushed out of his system that he could be termed at least adjacent to consciousness, Mary had some nurses help load him into a wheelchair despite their protestations and rolled him out to the front of the building herself. There was a cab waiting, and she mostly rolled his twitching, uncooperative body into the back, banging his shin on the door.

She must have been upset, he reflected. Mum hated calling cabs, or any interaction that didn’t further her efforts to harness the supernatural, and that feeling had only become more extreme when she died.

He stared out the portion of the windshield he could see from his slumped position, not realizing he was being spoken to until Mary smacked him on the arm. The whole area, extending much further than the shape of her hand, radiated pain. Right, burns.

“Are you  _ listening _ to me, Gerard?”

“Yess’m.” He tried to focus. Things would only get worse if she told him to do something and he missed it.

His mum sighed like an overheated laptop fan. “Useless. Just like your father. Don’t know why I even bother.”

The rant was an old one, but he was in no state to keep back a noise, feeling the same flare of aching curiosity he always felt when she mentioned his dad. Mary glared at him, shaking her head disappointedly, and continued on her rant. 

When they arrived at the shop, Gerard was conscious enough he could walk. Mostly. He could support his own weight enough he was unlikely to spend the night on the sidewalk rather than the floor of the front room. Walking ahead of him, Mum’s edges seemed to grey out, crumbling inward. She didn’t usually go so soon after manifesting. Maybe the hospital had really taken it out of her. Or maybe his vision was going and he was closer to blacking out than he’d guessed; it didn’t usually look like that when she vanished.

He limped a little faster, just in case, and was just over the threshold when he heard Mary  _ shriek _ .

He threw himself into the bookshop’s main room as fast as he could, adrenaline pumping, grabbing the nearest thing to hand to try and defend them (an umbrella with two broken spokes from the stand by the door). He didn’t know what he could do, still woozy from drugs and pain and not properly armed, against something that could make his  _ mother _ make a noise like that, half rage and half pain, but he had to try. He couldn’t tell if she was screaming wordlessly or if his muddled brain was just failing to interpret the sound as words, or maybe she was yelling in something other than English. Regardless, you didn’t need to understand the words to understand the emotion behind it. The stress of the situation combined with the memory of his recent injuries had him smelling smoke.

He had to lean, gasping, against a bookcase when he reached his mum, in the dim corner of the shop where she kept the proper Leitners and the ones with information actually relevant to the Dread Powers. Out of habit, his eyes went first to the small safe she’d installed after adding herself to the Trapped Dead, not even trusting her own son to touch the thing now that she was tied to it. His scan of the room stalled there for a long moment- for the first time in a long time, it was open.

Next to the safe was a woman, long and muscular, holding the book itself. She held a lighter, and flame was slowly eating through the book’s cover. Mary was poised on the opposite side of the room, screaming her anger and denial but unwilling to draw closer lest the stranger (but not a Stranger, he thought) burn the book faster.

It didn’t take long for both women to notice him. “Gerard!” his mum shouted, “Do something!”

He had no idea what she wanted him to do, when he could barely stand unsupported and still in a hospital gown. He stared at the other woman blankly. Her eyes, he noticed, gleamed in a way that didn’t seem quite right, but he was too exhausted to draw on Beholding and see if she was claimed. 

“Gerard!” his mum said again. He looked between her, looking less corporeal than usual and curling her hands into clawed fists, and the unknown woman. Her eyes were cool, more focused on the book than him or his mum. She didn’t seem angry or violent, just focused. Had she broken in while Mary was gone?

He swallowed, unsure his voice would even work, and croaked, “Her pages are at the very back.”

Everything seemed to hang suspended for a moment. His guts clenched with ice. What had he just done? The woman nodded and turned the book slightly, focusing her lighter on the back cover. “Should’ve thought of that. Thanks.”

“ _ You!” _ Mary hurled herself toward him, hitting and clawing. He could tell the moment the fire made it to her pages, the edges of her form curling and burning in time with the tanned skin. Gerard went down hard under her assault.

He brought his arms up, trying to protect his face. Part of him rebelled at the idea that she was really trying to  _ kill  _ him. Another said it was what he deserved for betraying her like that, and hadn’t he always known, deep down, it would end like this? Dead at her hands, just like whatever she did to his father? He should count himself lucky no one would be adding him to the book.

His ears were ringing and his vision was graying out, so it took him a second to register the stranger shouting and swinging a lamp between him and Mary, trying to get her off without getting burned herself. He rolled away as much as he could, banging into the doorframe. He was too tired and woozy to raise his head, but he felt the heat as Mary exploded into a column of fire and an unearthly scream.

-

Gerard didn’t remember losing consciousness, but he must have, because when he next opened his eyes there was a pillow tucked under his head and a blanket tossed over him, and the light was different. He was definitely in the same place he remembered being in last, but was any of the rest real, or some crazy drug-induced hallucination? 

He wasn’t going to find any answers on the floor, so he sat up woodenly. The haze in his head had been replaced by a pervasive pain, competing for attention with the blunter pain lancing over most of his skin. Much of it was exposed, bandages and hospital gown signed away.

“Do you need a hand?” Gerard flinched at the unfamiliar, unexpected voice. On the plus side, this brought him closer to sitting properly upright. On the down side, he was pretty sure he’d torn something on his abdomen. The strange woman from before stepped around and half over him so she could face him, one hand outstretched and the other clutching a cup of tea.

“Do you just break into people’s houses to burn their books and steal their tea?” he croaked. That was one point in favor of whatever had happened being real, at least. He wished the pain in his head would go away, so he could Look and see if she was affiliated with anything.

“...the tea was supposed to be for you, actually.” She held it out to him awkwardly. Gerard did nothing to alleviate the mood. He figured if you were going to break into someone’s house and incinerate their mum, you deserved whatever uncomfortable silences followed.

He took the tea, but held it in his lap instead of drinking. Both because he wasn’t sure he trusted a drink prepared by a possibly-murderous stranger and because he didn’t know how old any tea she found in the kitchen might have been. Did tea go bad? “And the book?”

She grimaced. “I mean. It was a Leitner. Sorry about your mum?” She didn’t seem sure whether condolences were actually in order, which Gerard figured was fine. He didn’t know either. He had been the one to tell her how to burn Mary faster.

“So you break into people’s houses to burn their Leitners specifically.”

“It was more of a one-off. It was supposed to be done before you got back.”

He nodded. He didn’t know what else to do. “So are you here to rob me now, or…?”

She glared at him. “I’m not going to  _ rob _ you. It just… didn’t seem right to leave you unconscious, injured, and alone. I can leave, if you’d prefer.”

He snorted. He  _ really  _ needed more information. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to force his headache away for just a few seconds, and looked at the woman.

She was marked heavily for the Hunt, in the way that almost always indicated an avatar, and the Buried, the way an escaped or half-finished victim might be. Terror inflicted and terror suffered. That was normal enough- plenty of people experienced one Fear and ran to the arms of another hoping to be strong enough to keep something like that from happening to them again. 

The third mark though, didn’t look like either. It was for Beholding, and somehow that made its oddity more galling, that he wasn’t able to solve this puzzle even though it involved his own patron. It was impressed as deeply as any he’d seen on a monster, avatar, artifact, or victim, but the fear just… wasn’t there. But that didn’t make  _ sense _ , you couldn’t pick up a mark from a Dread Power without fear being involved at  _ some  _ point, that was the whole point of them! He glared at the mark, but all that did was worsen his headache. “Huh.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you vibed with this, maybe go to my profile and check out my other daisy time travel stories :)


	14. Daisy, 27 December 2011

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter didn't get edited as much as usual, so there's a higher than usual chance of typos, lmk if you spot any. in related news, there may not be an update next week, bc finals and thanksgiving are conspiring to burn me out and mess with my writing schedule

She hadn’t meant to still be in Pinhole Books when the Keays came home- although, considering the way Mary had gone up, it was probably for the best that it happened when she was contained and in range of Daisy’s fire extinguisher, rather than at the hospital or in the back of a taxi- but getting in had been harder than anticipated. She’d skulked about since early in the morning, knowing it was the day Mary would go to check her son out of hospital and waiting to see her leave, but she foolishly hadn’t anticipated that Mary Keay might have set up safeguards against someone trying to break into the bookshop and poke their nose places she didn’t want it. By the time Daisy had managed to bypass her booby traps, they were back. 

Seeing the way Mary had gone up, she couldn’t help but be a little grateful that it had taken her so long. Things could have gone a lot worse, if Mary had gone up like that in a hospital waiting room or the backseat of a cab. Then again, things could have gone a lot better, too.

She felt a pang of guilt, looking down at Gerard Keay. She hadn’t meant to encounter him at all, but now he was lying on the floor, half his chest exposed by the torn and singed hospital gown and bandages, and probably in a worse state than he’d been in when he came in- and he hadn’t exactly looked stable then. She couldn’t just leave him there without doing  _ something _ . 

She dug up a pillow and blanket, so he wouldn’t get cold- apparently the undead saw no need for heating in December- or wake up with a crick in his neck. She could have tried to tend to his bandages and the newer burn blisters in the shape of clawing fingers Mary had raised across his arms, but from what little she knew of him, he seemed like the kind of person who wouldn’t appreciate being touched when they weren’t aware. That left her at loose ends until he woke up.

She couldn’t leave before then- if he  _ didn’t _ wake up, it was her fault, and she should at least call and ambulance, but unless and until things got concerning, she didn’t really want to have to explain the smoke stain on the ceiling or the bin full of smoldering pages to curious paramedics. 

Daisy had never been much for caretaking, and with the most immediate problems as solved as they could be without attempting to move Gerard and potentially injuring him worse, she had no idea what to do. In a moment of desperation, she tried to come through her memories- both the natural ones and those inherited from Jon- for a solution.

Jon had made tea, when something like this happened. She wasn’t quite sure if it was her own memory, of some incident in the Archives, or the impression of one of Jon’s, but even if Jon hadn’t seemed confident in it, it was better than standing there doing nothing.

The kitchen of the flat taking up the back half of the ground floor and the entirety of the upper floor of Pinhole Books wasn’t especially well-stocked, but she was able to find a box of what she was pretty sure was Earl Grey in the back of the cupboard. Even if the label was mostly faded, it didn’t seem  _ too _ dusty, so it would do. 

She’d worried about the tea going cold, but that apparently wasn’t going to be an issue, as Gerard was struggling upright when she rounded the corner to where she’d left him. “Do you need a hand?”

He jerked in alarm and she winced internally, berating herself for accidentally sneaking up on him. 

She gave him the tea and worked through the conversation on autopilot, mind spinning as she tried to figure out what to do next. She’d hoped he’d somehow give her direction when he woke up, but since he didn’t seem eager either to directly ask for help  _ or  _ order her out of his house, coming up with something was still down to her. 

She still had the sense, mostly cobbled together from his Statement and appearances in others, that Gerard might be the kind of person to see through her somehow, his current state notwithstanding. Combine that with the fact that she’d just murdered (re-murdered?) his mother in front of him, and she should probably leave. But on the other hand, he also seemed like the kind of person who knew enough about the Entities to be genuinely helpful, and it felt unnecessarily cruel to kill his mum and then ditch him without explanation.

Daisy realized the conversation had come to an inexplicable halt. She ran back through the past few minutes, but could think of nothing to cause it. Gerard was staring at her with a strange intensity. A strangely  _ familiar _ intensity, she realized, her stomach sinking. Aside from Gertrude taking her Statement, no one had tried to turn Beholding on her since she’d come back, and she wasn’t eager to know what it might find. Gerard specifically and the Eye generally  _ probably _ weren’t powerful enough, here and now, to annihilate her on the spot like Jon had made a habit of after the Change, but that didn’t mean she wanted either to know her true purpose or plans. Had the Statements ever mentioned exactly what kind of powers Gerard had?

The unnerving stare shifted to a glower, and Daisy’s stomach pitched. Gerard furrowed his brows and tilted his head. “Huh.”

“Something to share with the class?” she ventured.

He shot her another glare, but the power behind it was gone. “You’re not afraid of the Eye.”

“Not… particularly?” she answered, wondering where he was going with this. He was right- she’d been unnerved by Jon taking her Statement, and relived her fear in their shared dreams for Beholding’s enjoyment, but the fear in those encounters had always either centered on the memory of her first encounter with the coffin or been transmuted into anger. It had been hard, back then with the Hunt pulsing through her muscles without her full awareness, to feel afraid of much of anything, not when she felt confident in her ability to tear apart whatever crossed her path.

“But you don’t serve it, either,” he continued, looking upset at either the statement or her inability to keep up with whatever he was trying to say. Possibly both. Was he planning on going through this with every Power? What was the point of pulling on one to examine her, if so?

“No, I’m with-”

“The Hunt, I  _ know _ .” He glowered some more, and this one was definitely directed at her. She couldn’t find it in herself to be annoyed at the interruption, especially when as soon as the words were out of his mouth she was struck with the superstitious conviction that, true as it may be, she didn’t want to vocally identify herself with the Hunt unless it was absolutely necessary, that doing so would somehow give it a greater piece of her self. “You serve the Hunt, and you had some kind of encounter with the Buried, that makes  _ sense _ . But you’re marked by the Eye and aren’t either!” The expression on his face made her feel unaccountably fond; it was so much like Jon or Basira’s annoyance, trying to make sense of something that refused to fit their expectations and that they’d never seen before. At the same time, she bit the inside of her cheek. She had a suspicion of what might be causing his frustration; if having her Statement taken or working for the Institute were going to leave a mark on her, it seemed obvious which category they would fall into.

No, the only interaction she’d had with the Eye that made sense, that had effected her as deeply as the Hunt or her time in the coffin, was Jon, and the knowledge he’d pressed into her mind just before she came back. There hadn’t been fear there- worry, maybe, but not the proper terror the Entities thrived on. Just friendship, and concern, and trust.

Formulating a response that wouldn’t tell Gerard too much was delayed several seconds by the burst of lonely longing that hit her full in the chest. She had barely thought about Jon outside of her nightmares and circular worries about her impact on his future since arriving in the past. She felt winded at the reminder of how much she missed the easy atmosphere of mutual reliance they’d cultivated, by the end.

Gerard was still glaring, apparently oblivious to her inner turmoil. “How does something like that even  _ happen?” _ he demanded.

Daisy shrugged. “None of your business.” It had never worked on Jon or Basira or Gertrude or any other Eye avatar she’d encountered, and based on his expression it wouldn’t put Gerard off for long, either, but it’d have to do for now. She felt suddenly exhausted. “Do you want a hand getting somewhere besides the floor, or…?”

His mouth twisted. “Fine, I guess. Thanks. Any chance you can help me get up the stairs to my room? If not, kitchen’s fine.”

His shoulders pulled in, obviously uncomfortable asking for help, maybe even expecting her to take the offer back and laugh in his face, but it wasn’t like it was a reaction she was unused to working past. She’d thought that the vague secondhand fondness from Jon had come mostly from his guilt complex encompassing Gerard as a matter of course and him latching onto the idea of the dead man as someone who would have held all the answers he had wanted so desperately, but she could see, now, the shape of the friendship they might have had. If they weren’t so alike they took an instant dislike to one another, that is.

She bent in close, trying to touch Gerard without hurting him. “Tell me if I’m hurting you.” She lifted him into a bridal carry, as carefully as she could, without waiting for a response. Gerard made a noise which an ungenerous observer might have called a squeak. Daisy hid her snicker- she knew he’d been expecting her to help him walk, but this was faster and easier on them both.

Gerard slowly untensed, as it became clear she wasn’t going to drop or further injure him, and by the time she had him halfway up the frustratingly steep and narrow staircase, he’d recovered himself enough to return to his interrogation. “Do I get to know your name, or is that a third date activity for you Hunt types?”

“In what way is this a date?” she asked.

“You are carrying me over a threshold.” Gerard arched an eyebrow. He was lucky he was injured enough that she’d feel guilty about just dropping him.

She considered an answer. He already had more personal information on her than Gertrude, since she hadn’t anticipated the need to hide her identity. He also wasn’t being Watched the same way the Archivist was. And he could be helpful. She set him down on the bed. “Daisy. But don’t go sharing it around.”

Gerard nodded, mouthing the name to himself. “Right. Thanks, Daisy.”

She looked at him critically, the bandages and the way his head still wavered on his shoulders. She thought about the knowledge and connections he had, the ways he might be able to help. More help with less scrutiny than she was likely to find anywhere else, at least. She pulled a crumpled receipt from her pocket and scrawled her phone number on it. “Call me if you need anything. Freaky stuff, or if you fall and can’t get up.” He didn’t laugh, and she didn’t know why she’d kind of expected him to. “Hate to rescue you only for you to die a day later.”


	15. Gertrude, October-December 2011

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> turns out when i thought i was saying 'i'll be back after the holiday [thanksgiving]' i meant 'i'll be back after the holiday [the rest of the semester, all of winter break, and the first 2 weeks of spring semester]'
> 
> so this is still technically /a/ tuesday... and this is /a/ chapter, even if it's half as long as my usual... listen maybe if i get this out ill get over my block on this story
> 
> thanks to all y'all who commented during the unexpectedly long hiatus, i treasure them :)

Although Gertrude was certain her aversion to the Institute itself ran deeper than her paranoia around  _ Jonah Magnus _ (and hadn’t that been a shock, to have her suspicions confirmed and the exact method of his longevity revealed in one go), Alice had no problem at all making herself at home in the tunnels below. She’d appeared for their second meeting toting camp chairs. Gertrude only hoped Leitner didn’t come across the room. She didn’t want to deal with the man’s paranoia over another person entering his refuge, much less explain Alice and her ominous future.

Still, she had been agreeable enough, when Gertrude had shown she could hold a conversation without simply compelling Alice to share whatever secrets she wanted. It was almost unnerving how bluntly and succinctly she’d confirmed some of Gertrude’s theories; teasing out the secrets of the supernatural (or the Institute, insofar as the two were not one and the same) usually required long effort and myriad dead ends, in Gertrude’s experience. But she hadn’t caught Alice in a falsehood or inaccuracy yet. Just the gaps she refused to illuminate.

With little progress on discovering how to be rid of “Elias” for good or who he might promote as her replacement, Gertrude had instead focused her energies on Alice herself. It was clear the woman had gone to significant lengths to prevent her regular identity from being discovered, but Gertrude wasn’t nearly as concerned as the other woman that the information might be pulled from her head. Jonah hadn’t read her mind since well before she became Head Archivist, and she doubted that would change now. Among the clearly secondhand, deliberately generic outfits Alice had worn to both their meetings, one detail had stood out to Gertrude: her shoes. Clearly better quality than the rest of her clothes, and always polished to a shine. She rarely had dealings with the police, preferring to flee the scene before any inconvenient questions could be asked and leaving the Institute’s contracts to other departments, but Gertrude was sure she could expand that knowledge, given time. 

Her trips up beyond the archives were almost a relief, whenever her eyes started to blur from hours searching for evidence of any police employee named Alice or fitting her description. She suspected that Michael had spread his impression of her as a helpless, hapless old woman to his coworkers in the rest of the Institute. It would certainly explain why, when she drifted aimlessly at the corner of the research bullpen or ventured to the upstairs break room to alleviate the banality of the little archives kitchenette, she always seemed to attract hangers-on, who themselves never seemed interested in ingratiating themselves and trying for the promotion down to the archives (even hough the pay was better than research or the library and rumor must have spread that she was looking for new assistants by now) so much as fussing.

Martin Blackwood was one of her regular offenders. He was a tall man, solidly built, and gave off an undeniable air of clumsiness, though she had yet to catch him actually stumbling; Gertrude suspected he was neither as old nor as experienced as he claimed. He did make a good cup of tea, though, so she tolerated his solicitousness with a thin-lipped smile and dismissive nod. And the tea gave her a ready excuse to leave as soon as it was finished. 

Today, he was already hovering in the break room when she arrived. She wouldn’t be surprised to learn he spent more work hours there than the library. If she pressed Elias as to why he was employed there at all, she was sure he’d say Martin was “good for morale,” or something equally managerial and condescending, and entirely unrelated to whatever his real motivation was.

“Morning, Ms. Robinson!” Martin waved with the hand holding the washcloth he was using to clean out some mugs, flicking water onto his glasses. “I was just about to put the kettle on, would you like some?”

“Thank you, Martin.” She positioned herself at the small table, where she could eye the passerby in search of a figure or pair of eyes that matched those from Alice’s dreams. Martin rattled on amiably about the goings on in various departments and made repeated inquiries as to her health, as she’d come to expect from him. 

Elias had hired on a number of new employees- whatever he wanted them for, she suspected that its coinciding with his interest in replacing her pool of assistants and with Alice’s appearance was no coincidence. Gertrude normally would have disregarded it, focused on stopping the Rituals and left Elias to his petty machinations but- well. That was before. She hadn’t been aware her tenure at the Magnus Institute might be ending very soon, then. 

“We’ve had a number of new hires recently, haven’t we?” she asked when Martin babbled himself into an awkward lull, “What do you think of them?”

Martin sat up straighter, eyes darting. “Oh! Well, in the library we’ve got Hannah and Jason, they’re nice enough, Diana seems happy with them. Most of the hiring was for research and Artefact Storage, so I don’t know the rest especially well.” 

Gertrude hummed noncommittally. It was perhaps a bit much to expect Martin to give her anything  _ really _ useful, not when he was so much of a people pleaser. She didn’t need Beholding to know he was worried about giving a bad impression of his colleagues to a superior, or giving an impression of himself as a gossip. She drummed her fingers against the side of her mug. “I don’t suppose you know of anyone at the Institute whose expressed an interest in the archives? Elias has been suggesting I could do with some new assistants.” It seemed unlikely that he would replace her with someone with an interest in actual archiving, but an interest in the archives might also indicate a past encounter or particular susceptibility to the Eye’s influence. 

Martin shrank a bit. “No, er, I don’t think so? I can keep an ear out if you like?”

“Hm.” Gertrude rose to rinse out her mug and returned to the archives and more fruitful avenues of research, leaving Martin to stutter a farewell behind her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> soooo i'd like to keep updating every tuesday as i was before taking a break, but a) the muse for this story is resting (not dead! but resting, probably until i chug through the stuff that needs to happen but isn't Exciting) and b) i just started the last semester of my degree (god willing) and i'm taking 21 credits... full time is 12, and you have to have your counselor sign a waiver for more than 18 😂 and part of finishing my degree is writing a capstone, which is a *~25 page paper~*
> 
> which is a long way of saying that i'll try to keep up weekly updates, but don't count on that being actually reliable until maybe june. but also don't abandon hope, there's a decent chance i start procrastinating schoolwork with this lol. in the mean time, you could go find me on tumblr @inklingofadream or check out my other works here on ao3- i have a wip and a completed series focused on other versions of the "time travel fix it but it's daisy" concept, with extra double doses of Jon whump, plus... other cool stuff. Kurt Vonnegut* fic. miscellaneous tma femslash. Vibes.
> 
> *eta: fic about his works, i do not write kurt vonnegut rpf, i'm not that far gone yet

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr @inklingofadream! Comment and kudos if you enjoyed!


End file.
